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Esperanto orthography

Esperanto is written in a Latin alphabet of twenty-eight letters, with upper and lower case. This is supplemented by punctuation marks and by various logograms, such as the numerals 0–9, currency signs such as $, and mathematical symbols.

Twenty-two of the letters are identical in form to letters of the English alphabet (q, w, x, and y being omitted). The remaining six have diacritic marks, ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, and ŭ (that is, c, g, h, j, and s circumflex, and u breve). The full alphabet is:

With the exception of c (= [ts]) and the diacritic letters, the letters have approximately the sound values of the IPA. (See Esperanto pronunciation.) There is a nearly one-to-one correspondence of letter to sound; the only significant exceptions being the sequence kz, as in ekzemple, which is frequently pronounced [ɡz]. See Esperanto phonology.)

In handwritten Esperanto, the diacritics pose no problem. However, since they don't appear on standard alphanumeric keyboards, various alternate methods have been devised for representing them in printed and typed text. The original method was a set of digraphs now known as the "h-system", but with the rise of computer word processing a so-called "x-system" has become equally popular. These systems are described below. However, with the advent of Unicode, the need for such work-arounds has lessened.

Unique to the Esperanto script is the spesmilo (1000 specie) sign, an Sm monogram for a now-obsolete international unit of auxiliary Esperanto currency used by a few British and Swiss banks before World War I. It has been assigned the Unicode value U+20B7, though in ordinary fonts it is often is transcribed as Sm, usually italic.

Origin

The script is modeled after Western Slavic scripts such as the Czech or Sorbian alphabet. However, the use of circumflexes instead of carons for the letters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ avoids the appearance of any national version of the Latin alphabet, and the non-Slavic bases g, j of the letters ĝ and ĵ, rather than Slavic dž, ž, help preserve the printed appearance of Latinate and Germanic vocabulary such as ĝenerala "general" and ĵurnalo "journal". The letter v stands for either v or w of other languages. The letter ŭ of the diphthongs aŭ, eŭ appears to be from the Belarusian Łacinka alphabet, historically associated with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. (Today Łacinka is strikingly similar to the Esperanto alphabet, but in Zamenhof's day it was closer to Polish; the convergence came with orthographic reforms two decades after Zamenhof went public with Esperanto.)

Due to these Slavic origins, the spelling of geographic names is sometimes divergent from English. This is especially remarked upon when English has the letters x, w, qu, or gu, as in Vaŝintono "Washington", Meksiko "Mexico", or Gvatemalo "Guatemala". However, such spellings are normal to several languages of Central, Northern, and Eastern Europe. Compare the Esperanto forms with Croatian Vašington, Meksiko, and Gvatemala. Likewise, cunamo, from Japanese tsunami, is similar to Czech and Latvian cunami.

Non-printed variants

Esperanto versions of international Morse code and Braille include the six diacritic letters. In Braille, the circumflex is indicated by adding a point at position 6 (lower right), and the u-breve is the mirror image of u. An Esperanto Braille magazine, Aŭroro, has been published since 1920.

There is a proposed manual alphabet as part of the Signuno project. Signuno itself, as signed Esperanto rather than a language in its own right, is a manual logographic Esperanto orthography. The Signuno alphabet deviates from international norms (that is, ASL with an Irish T) in that all letters are upright, with a straight wrist: the G is simply turned upright, while the H, P, Q are taken from Irish, the J from Russian, and the Z appears to be unique to Signuno. (It's shaped like an ASL 3, and appears to be derived from alphabetically adjacent V the way Ŭ was derived from adjacent U.) The diacritic letters Ŝ, Ĥ, Ĝ, Ŭ are derived from their base letters S, H, G, U; while Ĉ and Ĵ, like J, are Russian. Numerals 1-5 include the thumb, 6-9 do not, and 10, 100, 1000 are the Roman numerals X, C, M.

The names of the letters of the alphabet

Zamenhof simply tacked an -o onto each consonant to create the name of the letter, with the vowels representing themselves: a, bo, co, ĉo, do, e, fo, etc. The diacritics are frequently mentioned overtly. For instance, ĉ may be called ĉo ĉapela or co ĉapela, from ĉapelo (a hat), and ŭ may be called ŭo luneta or u luneta, from luno (a moon) plus the diminutive -et-.

This is fine for initialisms such as ktp [kotopo] for etc., but can be problematic when spelling out names. This is especially true because several consonantal distinctions are difficult for some nationalities, who normally rely on the fact that Esperanto seldom uses these sounds to distinguish words. (That is, they don't form many minimal pairs.) Thus the pairs of letter names ĵo ĝo, ĥo ho (or ĥo ko), co ĉo (or co so, co to), and ŭo vo are problematic. In addition, over a noisy telephone connection it quickly becomes apparent that voicing distinctions can be difficult to make out: noise confounds the pairs po bo, to do, ĉo ĝo, ko go, fo vo, so zo, ŝo ĵo, as well as the nasals mo no. In addition, lo ro is a difficult distinction for many Asians, Africans, and Pacific Islanders; whereas speakers of languages with no /b/-/v/ contrast, like Spanish or Japanese, have trouble with bo vo.

There have been several proposals to resolve this problem. The one closest to international norms (and thus the easiest to remember) that also clarifies all the above distinctions is a modification of a proposal by Kálmán Kalocsay. As with Zamenhof, vowels stand for themselves, but it follows the international standard of placing vowel e after a consonant by default (be, ce, de, ge), but before sonorants (el, en) and voiceless fricatives (ef, es). The vowel a is used for and the voiceless plosives , after the international names ha for and ka for ; the French name ĵi is used for <ĵ>, the Greek name ĥi (chi) for <ĥ>, and the English name ar for . The letter has the i vowel of ĵi, but the other voiced fricative, , does not, to avoid the problem of it palatalizing and being confused with ĵi. The diphthong offglide <ŭ> is named eŭ, the only real possibility given Esperanto phonotactics besides aŭ, which as the word for "or" would cause confusion. The letter is called om to distinguish it from ; the vowel o alliterates well in the alphabetical sequence el, om, en, o, pa. There are other patterns to the vowels in the ABC rhyme: The lines start with a i a i and finish with a a e e. The letters with diacritics are placed at the end of the rhyme, taking the place of w, x, y in other Latin alphabets, so as not to disrupt the pattern of letters many people learned as children. All this makes the system more easily memorized than competing proposals. The non-Esperanto Latin letters are not affected by Kalocsay's scheme, as they already have distinct names (ku, ikso, ipsilono). The modified Kalocsay abecedary is:

a, be, ce, de, e, ef, ge, ha,

i, je, ka, el, om, en, o, pa,

ar, es, ta, u, vi, ĉa, ĝe,

ĥi kaj ĵi, eŝ, eŭ kaj ze,

''plus ku, ikso, ipsilono,

jen la abece-kolono.

(kaj means "and". The last line reads: voilà the ABC column)

Where letters are still confused, such as es vs eŝ or a vs ha, mention can be made of the diacritic (eŝ ĉapela), or to the manner of articulation of the sound (ha brueta "breathy aitch"). Quite commonly, however, people will use the ’aitch as in ’ouse strategy used in English.

Punctuation

As with most languages, punctuation is not completely standardized, but in Esperanto there is the additional complication of multiple competing national traditions.

Commas are required to introduce subordinate clauses (that is, before ke "that" or the ki- correlatives),

Mi ne scias, kiel fari tion. (I don't know how to do that.)

The comma is also used for the decimal point, while thousands are separated by non-breaking spaces: 12 345 678,9.

Question marks (?) and exclamation marks (!) are used at the end of a clause, and may be internal to a sentence. Question words generally come at the beginning of a question, obviating the need for Spanish-style inverted question marks.

Periods may be used to indicate initialisms: k.t.p. or ktp for kaj tiel plu (et cetera), but not abbreviations that retain the grammatical suffixes. Instead, a hyphen optionally replaces the missing letters: D-ro or Dro for Doktoro (Dr). With ordinal numerals, the adjectival a and accusative n may be superscripted: 13a or 13ª (13^th). The abbreviation k is used without a period for kaj (and); the ampersand (&) is not found. Roman numerals are also avoided.

The hyphen is also occasionally used to clarify compounds, and to join grammatical suffixes to proper names that haven't been Esperantized or don't have a nominal -o suffix, such as the accusative on Kalocsay-n or Kálmán-on. Zamenhof used a hyphen to attach particles to correlatives, such as tiu-ĉi (this one here), but this has fallen out of use.

Quotation marks show the greatest variety of any punctuation. Before computerized word processing, they reflected what the printer had available, which was often the national standard of the country where the printer was located. — Dashes, « guillemets » (often »reversed«), “double apostrophes” (also often „reversed“), and more are all found. (However, the 「East Asian」 quotes are not used, as they were designed to fit Chinese characters.) Very occasionally characters in a novel will be distinguished by individualizing the quotation marks used for them. Quotations are introduced with a comma or colon.

Capitalization

Capitalization is used for the first word of a sentence and for proper names used as nouns. Names of months, days of the week, ethnicities, languages, and the adjectival forms of proper names, etc., are not typically capitalized [anglo (an Englishperson), zamenhofa (Zamenhofian)], although national norms may override such generalizations. Titles are more variable: both the Romance style of capitalizing only the first word of the title and the English style of capitalizing all lexical words are found.

All capitals or small capitals are used for acronyms and initialisms of proper names, like TEJO, but not common expressions like ktp (etc.). Small capitals are also a common convention for family names, to avoid the confusion of varying national naming conventions: KALOCSAY Kálmán, Leslie CHEUNG Kwok Wing.

Camel case, with or without a hyphen, may occur when a prefix is added to a proper noun: la geZamenhofoj (the Zamenhofs), pra-Esperanto (Proto-Esperanto). It is also used for Russian-style syllabic acronyms, such as the name ReVo for Reta Vortaro ("Internet Dictionary"), which is homonymous with revo (dream). Occasionally mixed capitalization will be used for orthographic puns, such as espERAnto, which stands for the Esperanto radikala asocio (Radical Esperanto Association).

Zamenhof contrasted informal ci with formal, and capitalized, Vi as the second-person singular pronouns. However, lower-case vi is now used as the second-person pronoun regardless of number.

ASCII transliteration systems

There are two alternate orthographies in common use, which replace the circumflex letters with either h digraphs or x digraphs. There are in also work-arounds such as approximating the circumflexes with carets.

The h-system

The original method of working around the diacritics was developed by the creator of Esperanto himself, L. L. Zamenhof. He recommended using u in place of ŭ, and using digraphs with h for the circumflex letters. For example, ŝ is represented by sh, as in shi for ŝi (she), and shanco for ŝanco (chance).

Unfortunately this method suffers from several problems:

h is already a consonant in the language, so digraphs occasionally make words ambiguous;
when ŭ is changed to u, not only is there the occasional ambiguity, but a naive reading may place the stress on the wrong syllable;
simplistic ASCII-based rules for sorting words fail badly for sorting h-digraphs, because lexicographically words in ĉ should follow words all in c and precede words in d. The word ĉu should be placed after ci, but sorted in the h-system, chu would appear before ci.

The x-system

A more recent system for typing in Esperanto is the so-called "x-system", which uses x instead of h for the digraphs, including ux for ŭ. For example, ŝ is represented by sx, as in sxi for ŝi and sxanco for ŝanco.

X-digraphs solve those problems of the h-system:

x is not a letter in the Esperanto alphabet, so its use introduces no ambiguity;
words starting with cx are now nearly always correctly sorted after words starting with c. The sorting only fails in the special case of a z; for example, the compound word reuzi (to reuse) would be sorted after reŭmatismo (rheumatism). Such cases are rare.

The x-system has become as popular as the h-system, but many people dislike it for its perceived "odd" appearance - in the words of one Esperantist, it "aspektas klingone" (looks like Klingon). Proponents argue that it would look "odd" only if one is expecting the appearance to resemble that of other European languages.

A practical problem of digraph substitution that the x-system does not completely resolve is in the complication of bilingual texts. Ux for ŭ is especially problematic when used alongside French text, because many French words end in aux or eux. Aux, for example, is a word in both languages (aŭ in Esperanto). Any automatic conversion of the text will alter the French words as well as the Esperanto. A few English words like "auxiliary" and "Euxine" can also suffer from such search-and-replace routines. A few people have proposed using "vx" instead of "ux" for ŭ to resolve this problem, but this variant of the system is rarely used. Some systems use xx to escape the ux to ŭ conversion, e.g. "auxx" would produce "aux".

Graphic work-arounds

An occasional work-around is the use of the caret character (^) to represent the circumflex, either before or after the letter that takes the diacritic. For example, ŝanco would become ^sanco or s^anco. This has the twin advantages of being unambiguous and also being iconic with the official orthography. It is primarily seen in on-line introductions to Esperanto written in another language such as English, where there is no font support for the diacritics but introducing the digraphs would be needlessly confusing.

A variant shifts the caret onto the following vowel, since the circumflex vowels of French are widely supported. That is, one would write ehôsângôj cîujâude for eĥoŝanĝoj ĉiuĵaŭde. However, this proposal does not seem to have gotten off the ground.

Many new Esperantists from America and Western Europe, who are not used to diacritics from their own languages, perceive the Esperanto diacritics to be a problem, and often propose reforms to the orthography, sometimes with substantial modifications, in order to "fix" it. Such proposals are ignored by the community, both because they generally come from people who do not know the language well, and because reform projects tend to snowball, a fate that has destroyed several constructed languages.

The transliteration of Esperanto into ASCII is a topic known to cause flame wars with little constructive discussion. The reduction of such behavior is sometimes indicated as one of the main reasons to go to the extra effort of using the proper diacritics. With the advent of Unicode, transliteration systems are no longer necessary on web pages. Nonetheless, the h- and x-systems remain common on Usenet and in e-mail, where encoding support is rare and the limited availability of keyboard configurations often makes it cumbersome to type the diacritics.

Unicode

The entire Esperanto alphabet is part of the Latin-3 and Unicode character sets, and is included in WGL4. The HTML entities for the special Esperanto characters in Unicode are:

C-circumflex: Ĉ
c-circumflex: ĉ
G-circumflex: Ĝ
g-circumflex: ĝ
H-circumflex: Ĥ
h-circumflex: ĥ
J-circumflex: Ĵ
j-circumflex: ĵ
S-circumflex: Ŝ
s-circumflex: ŝ
U-breve: Ŭ
u-breve: ŭ

Practical Unicode for Esperanto

Microsoft Windows

Adjusting a keyboard to type Unicode is actually relatively easy (all Windows variants of the Microsoft Windows NT family, such as 2000 and XP, for example, support Unicode; Windows 9x does not natively support Unicode).

A simple and free utility with all the Esperanto keys already installed is called Esperanto keyboard layout for Microsoft Windows — (QWERTY version) this is available as a free download

A similar tool is Ek, and is available without charge. You can download the keyboard by clicking on Instalilo: ek(version#)inst.exe Ek uses the cx keying function to produce ĉ. It will work with most programs but there are some that it is not compatible with.

A commercial but still cheap tool is Šibboleth, a program that can produce every Latin character. It enables composition of ĝ etc. using the ^ deadkey (like for French letters), so you do not have to learn new key positions. The ŭ is produced by the combination u(followed by #.

Many popular e-mail clients support Unicode, so you can happily use the tools described above to write e-mails using the Esperanto alphabet.

If you want to use a text editor that is Esperanto-compatible, make sure it supports Unicode, as do Editplus (UTF-8) and UniRed

Linux

In Linux systems, configuration difficulty pretty much depends on whether your system version is old or new. This is so, because on old systems, it may be necessary to activate Unicode by setting the locale to a UTF-8 locale. There is a special eo_XX.UTF-8 locale available at Bertil Wennergren's home page, along with a thorough explanation of how one implements Unicode and the keyboard in Linux.

If the Linux system is recent, or kept updated, then the system is probably already working with Esperanto keys. For X11 and KDE, it's only necessary to switch to a keyboard layout that has Latin dead keys (for example, the "US International" keyboard), whenever the user wants to write in Esperanto. Some keyboards with dead keys are those:

In the US International keyboard, the dead circumflex is over the "6" key ("shift-6") and the dead breve is hidden over the "9" key ("altgr-shift-9").
In the Brazilian ABNT2 keyboard, the dead circumflex has its own key together with dead tilde ("shift-~"), near the "Enter" key. The dead breve is hidden over the backslash ("altgr-shift-") key.
In the Portuguese keyboard, the dead tilde key, near the left shift key, has both the dead circumflex and the dead breve.

X11 standard mappings for Esperanto keys
Keys / Layout	US International	Brazilian ABNT2	Portuguese
ĉ	shift-6 c	shift-~ c	shift-~ c
Ĉ	shift-6 shift-c	shift-~ shift-c	shift-~ shift-c
ĝ	shift-6 g	shift-~ g	shift-~ g
Ĝ	shift-6 shift-g	shift-~ shift-g	shift-~ shift-g
ĥ	shift-6 h	shift-~ h	shift-~ h
Ĥ	shift-6 shift-h	shift-~ shift-h	shift-~ shift-h
ĵ	shift-6 j	shift-~ j	shift-~ j
Ĵ	shift-6 shift-j	shift-~ shift-j	shift-~ shift-j
ŝ	shift-6 s	shift-~ s	shift-~ s
Ŝ	shift-6 shift-s	shift-~ shift-s	shift-~ shift-s
ŭ	altgr-shift-9 u	altgr-shift- u	altgr-shift-~ u
Ŭ	altgr-shift-9 shift-u	altgr-shift- shift-u	altgr-shift-~ shift+u

In GNOME and GTK+ software, there exists a separate keyboard layout for Esperanto, replacing unused characters in Esperanto with the non-ASCII characters. A separate keyboard layout for Esperanto is available in KDE, too.

If necessary, install and use high quality fonts that have Esperanto glyphs, like Microsoft Web core fonts (free for personal use) or DejaVu (The Bitstream Vera glyphs have the Bitstream Vera license and DejaVu extensions are in public domain).

Mac OS X

On Mac OS X systems, Esperanto characters can be entered by activating the U.S. Extended keyboard layout in the "Input Menu" pane of the "International" system preferences.

When the U.S. Extended keyboard layout is active, Esperanto characters can be entered using multiple keystrokes using a simple mnemonic device: the 6 key contains the caret character, which looks like a circumflex, so option-6 places a caret over the following character; similarly, Option-b stands for breve, so option-b adds the breve mark over the next character.

The full reference is as follows:

Char	Name	Keystrokes
Ĉ	C-circumflex	option-6 shift-c
ĉ	c-circumflex	option-6 c
Ĝ	G-circumflex	option-6 shift-g
ĝ	g-circumflex	option-6 g
Ĥ	H-circumflex	option-6 shift-h
ĥ	h-circumflex	option-6 h
Ĵ	J-circumflex	option-6 shift-j
ĵ	j-circumflex	option-6 j
Ŝ	S-circumflex	option-6 shift-s
ŝ	s-circumflex	option-6 s
Ŭ	U-breve	option-b shift-u
ŭ	u-breve	option-b u

Swedish Esperantists using Mac OS X can use the Finnish Extended layout, which comes with the OS. Finnish has the same alphabet and type layout as Swedish; the Finnish Extended layout adds functionality just like U.S. Extended, only using other key combinations (the breve appears when you type option+y and the circumflex when you type a circumflex).

Similarly, British users may use the Irish Extended layout, which differs from the U.S. Extended keyboard layout in several ways (preserving the simple option+vowel method of applying acute accents, important for the Irish language, and the £ sign on shift-3 like the UK layout), but uses the same "dead-keys" for modifiers as U.S. Extended for Esperanto characters.

Locale

An Esperanto locale would use "." as the thousands separator and "," as the decimal separator. Time and date format among Esperantists is not as standardized as number format, but 24-hour time with colon between hour and minutes, and for dates, either yyyy-mm-dd or dd-mm-yyyy, would be international and unambiguous.

Ŝava Alfabeto

While Esperanto officially uses the Latin Alphabet, the Shavian alphabet, which was designed for English, has been modified for use in Esperanto. Since Esperanto has no dialects, it is an easy transliteration.

References

External links

EK — a program for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP that allows Esperanto letters to be typed in various ways
Unired — Unicode plain text editor for Windows 95/98/NT/2000 (with E-o support)
eoconv — a tool to convert text between various Esperanto orthographies and character encodings
Signuno — (in Esperanto) a proposal for signed Esperanto, including manual alphabet.
Esperanto keyboard layouts for Mac OS X — (both QWERTY- and Dvorak-style versions)
Esperanto keyboard layout for Microsoft Windows — (QWERTY version)