proper names such as ('Schiller'), ('Buddha', now more commonly ); and in a handful of unstable borrowings such as ('a sports match'). In compounds of lexical words, Zamenhof separated identical consonants with an epenthetic vowel, as in ('the evening of life'), never . Word-final consonants occur, though final voiced obstruents are generally rejected. For example, Latin ('to') became Esperanto , and Polish ('than') morphed into Esperanto ('than'). Sonorants and voiceless obstruents, on the other hand, are found in many of the numerals: ('hundred'), ('eight'), ('seven'), ('six'), ('five'), ('four'); also ('during'), ('even'). Even the poetic elision of final -o is rarely seen if it would leave a final voiced obstruent. A very few words with final voiced obstruents do occur, such as ('but') and ('next to'), but in such cases there is no minimal-pair contrast with a voiceless counterpart (that is, there is no or to cause confusion). This is because many people, including the Slavs and Germans, do not contrast voicing in final obstruents. For similar reasons, sequences of obstruents with mixed voicing are not found in Zamenhofian compounds, apart from numerals and grammatical forms, thus 'for a long time', not . (Note that is an exception to this rule, like in the Slavic languages. It is effectively ambiguous between fricative and approximant. The other exception is , which is commonly treated as .) Syllabic consonants occur only as interjections and onomatopoeia: . All triconsonantal onsets begin with a sibilant, s or ŝ. Disregarding proper names, such as , the following initial consonant clusters occur: Stop + liquid – bl, br; pl, pr; dr; tr; gl, gr; kl, krVoiceless fricative + liquid – fl, fr; sl; ŝl, ŝrVoiceless sibilant + voiceless stop (+ liquid) – sc , sp, spl, spr; st, str; sk, skl, skr; ŝp, ŝpr; ŝt, ŝtrObstruent + nasal – gn, kn, sm, sn, ŝm, ŝnObstruent + – gv, kv, sv, ŝvAnd more marginally, Consonant + – (tj), ĉj, fj, vj, njAlthough it does not occur initially, the sequence is pronounced as an affricate, as in ('a husband') with an open first syllable [e], not as . In addition, initial occurs in German-derived ('penny'), in Sanskrit ('kshatriya'), and several additional uncommon initial clusters occur in technical words of Greek origin, such as mn-, pn-, ks-, ps-, sf-, ft-, kt-, pt-, bd-, such as ('a sphincter' which also has the coda ). Quite a few more clusters turn up