Esperanto topics
This article is part of the Esperanto series
Language
Esperanto | Grammar | Letters | Phonology | Orthography | Vocabulary
History
History | Zamenhof | Proto-Esperanto | "Unua Libro" | Declaration of Boulogne | "Fundamento" | Prague Manifesto
Culture and media
Culture | Esperantist | Esperantujo | Film | Internacia Televido | La Espero | Libraries | Literature | Music | Native speakers | Pop culture references | Publications | Symbols | Zamenhof Day
National Associations
Australia | Britain | British Youth | Canada | USA | Labour
Organization and services
Amikeca Reto | Esperanto Academy | Kurso de Esperanto | Encyclopedia | Pasporta Servo | Plouézec Meetings | TEJO | UEA | SAT | World Congress | Youth Congress | Skolta Esperanto Ligo
Criticism
Esperantido | Propedeutic value | Reformed | Riism | Vs. Ido | Vs. Interlingua | Vs. Novial
Related topics
Auxiliary language | Constructed language | Ido | Interlingua | Novial | Volapük | Signuno | Anationalism
Wikimedia
Portal | Vikipedio | Vikivortaro | Vikicitaro | Vikifonto | Vikilibroj | Vikikomunejo | Vikispecoj

Esperanto is written in a Latin alphabet of twenty-eight letters, 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. Image File history File links Flag_of_Esperanto. ... Look up Esperanto in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Esperanto is a constructed auxiliary language based on the languages of Europe. ... The creator of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof, did not specify phonemic-phonetic correspondences for his language. ... The word base of Esperanto was originally defined by Lingvo internacia, published by Zamenhof in 1887. ... The constructed international auxiliary language Esperanto was developed in the 1870s and 80s by L. L. Zamenhof, and first published in 1887. ... L. L. Zamenhof Dr. Ludovic Lazarus (Ludwik Lejzer, Ludwik Łazarz) Zamenhof (December 15, 1859 – April 14, 1917) was an eye doctor, philologist, and the initiator of Esperanto, the most widely spoken and successful constructed language in the world. ... Proto-Esperanto (or pra-Esperanto in the language itself) is the modern term for any of the stages in the evolution of L. L. Zamenhofs language project, prior to the publication of his Unua Libro in 1887. ... Unua Libro por Rusoj (first edition, 1887, in Russian) Unua Libro por Angloj (first edition in English, 1888) The Unua Libro (First Book) was the first publication to describe the international language, Esperanto (then called Lingvo Internacia, inter-national language). It was first published in Russian on July 26, 1887... The Declaration of Boulogne (Bulonja Deklaracio) was a document written by L. L. Zamenhof and endorsed by the attendees of the first world congress of Esperanto in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France in 1905. ... The Fundamento de Esperanto (Foundation of Esperanto) is a book by L. L. Zamenhof, published in the spring of 1905. ... The Prague Manifesto (or Manifesto de Prago) is a set of seven widely-shared principles of the Esperanto movement. ... The language Esperanto is often used to access an international culture. ... An Esperantist is a person who participates in the diffusion of Esperanto. ... Esperantujo, also Esperantio, is a term used by speakers of the planned international language Esperanto to refer to the sphere of activity taking place in that language. ... // Feature films There are two feature films known to have been shot exclusively in the constructed language Esperanto. ... Internacia Televido was an internet-based Esperanto-language television station, launched on 5 November 2005. ... La Espero (The Hope) is a poem written by L. L. Zamenhof (1859-1917), the initiator of the Esperanto language. ... The following Esperanto libraries and collections of works in the Esperanto language are worthy of note: The Montagu Butler Library of Esperanto materials, maintained by the British Esperanto Association, whose collection of 30,000 items is often quoted. ... Since Esperanto is the largest planned language, there are over 25,000 books in Esperanto and the largest Esperanto book service at the World Esperanto Association sells over 4,000 books. ... Music in a variety of styles is written, recorded, and performed in Esperanto, a planned language used for international communication. ... Native Esperanto speakers (in Esperanto denaskuloj) come to be in families in which Esperanto (and usually other languages) is spoken. ... The constructed language Esperanto has been used in a number of films and novels. ... December 15 (Zamenhof Day, Zamenhofa Festo) is the birthday of L. L. Zamenhof, the initiator of Esperanto. ... Junularo Esperantista Brita (JEB) is the organisation for young Esperantists in the British Isles. ... SATEB (Workers’ Esperanto Movement) is the British affiliate of the non-nationalist world organisation SAT (Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda) which is a world-wide worker movement active in socialist, peace, trade union, feminist and environmental issues. ... This is a list of Esperanto organizations. ... Amikeca Reto (Friendship Network) is a directory of people around the world who do not necessarily want to host other Esperanto speakers, but want to work together and exchange ideas with others around the world. ... The Akademio de Esperanto is, according to its website, an independent language institute whose task is to conserve and protect the fundamental principles of the language Esperanto and control its evolution. ... Kurso de Esperanto is a free language course software with 12 units for the constructed language Esperanto. ... Encyclopedia of Esperanto may refer to three different attempts of creating an encyclopedia of all Esperanto topics. ... The Pasporta Servo (Passport Service) is a publication in Esperanto. ... The Breton village of Plouézec has hosted an International Meeting annually since 1997. ... TEJO is the Tutmonda Esperantista Junulara Organizo, or World Esperanto Youth Organization. ... The World Esperanto Association (in Esperanto UEA: Universala Esperanto-Asocio) is the largest international organization of Esperanto speakers, with members in 119 countries (as of 2000) and in official relations with the United Nations and UNESCO. In addition to individual members, 95 national Esperanto organizations are affiliated to UEA. Its... Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda (SAT; in English, World Anational Association) was founded in 1921 by Eugène LANTI. SAT is a world-wide worker movement active in socialist, peace, trade union, feminist and environmental issues. ... The World Congress of Esperanto (in Esperanto: Universala Kongreso de Esperanto) has the longest tradition among international Esperanto conventions, with an almost unbroken run of nearly a hundred years. ... The International Youth Congress of Esperanto or Internacia Junulara Kongreso is the biggest annual meeting of young esperantists in the world and participants usually number around 300 but have been know to have more than 1000 esperanto-speakers from all over the world coming for the entire week. ... The third universal congress of Esperanto was held in 1907 in Cambridge, England. ... Esperanto was conceived as a language of international communication, more precisely as a universal second language. ... Esperantido is the term used within the Esperanto and constructed language communities to describe a language project based on or inspired by Esperanto. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Reformed Esperanto was a reformed version of Esperanto created in 1894. ... Riism (Riismo in Esperanto) is a modification of Esperanto to simplify it, to make it symmetric, and to incorporate non-sexist language and gender-neutral pronouns into it. ... This article attempts to highlight the main differences between Esperanto and Ido, two constructed languages that have a related past but have since parted ways. ... Esperanto and Interlingua are two planned languages which have taken radically different approaches to the problem of providing an International auxiliary language (IAL). ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Novial // Alphabet and Pronunciation Both Esperanto and Novial are written using versions of the Latin alphabet. ... An international auxiliary language (sometimes abbreviated as IAL or auxlang) is a language used (or to be used in the future) for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language. ... A constructed or artificial language — known colloquially as a conlang — is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary have been devised by an individual or small group, instead of having naturally evolved as part of a culture. ... Ido (pronounced ) is a constructed language that was created to become a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds, easier to learn than any ethnic language. ... Interlingua is an international auxiliary language (IAL) published in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). ... Novial [nov-, new + IAL, International Auxiliary Language] is a constructed language devised by Professor Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist who had previously been involved in the Ido movement. ... Volapük is a constructed language, created in 1879–1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Roman Catholic priest in Baden, Germany. ... Signuno alphabet & numerals Signuno is signed Esperanto, derived from Gestuno roots and Esperanto morphology by an anonymous author. ... Anationalism is a term originating from the community of Esperanto speakers. ... Look up Esperanto in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... The term punctuation has two different linguistic meanings: in general, the act and the effect of punctuating, i. ... A Chinese logogram A logogram, or logograph, is a single written character which represents a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). ... A numeral is a symbol or group of symbols that represents a number. ... In mathematics, a set of symbols is frequently used in mathematical expressions. ...

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: The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... A diacritical mark or diacritic, also called an accent mark, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The circumflex ( ˆ ) (often called a caret, a hat or an uppen) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Dutch, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Japanese romaji, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, Afrikaans and other languages, and formerly in Turkish [citation needed]. It received its English name from Latin circumflexus (bent... A breve (Latin brevis short, brief) is a diacritical mark Ë˜, shaped like a little round cup, designed to indicate a short vowel, as opposed to the macron Â¯ which indicates long vowels. ...

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 [gz]; and borrowed words such as ŭato that use ŭ for initial [w], which is normally an allophone of v. (See Esperanto phonology.) For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words see here. ... Below is a list of all of the letters in the Esperanto alphabet and how to pronounce them transliterated into English and SAMPA. a: ah, [a] b: b, [b] c: ts [ts] ĉ: ch, [tS] d: d, [d] e: eh, [e] f: f, [f] g: hard g (as in go... The creator of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof, did not specify phonemic-phonetic correspondences for his language. ...

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. Alphanumeric keyboards include typewriter and computer keyboards. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ...

Sm

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 no Unicode value, and in ordinary fonts is transcribed as Sm, usually italic. Image File history File links The italic spesmilo sign for the obsolete Esperanto currency. ... Image File history File links The italic spesmilo sign for the obsolete Esperanto currency. ... The Spesmilo (Sm) is an obsolete decimal international currency, proposed in 1907 by René de Saussure and used before the First World War by a few British and Swiss banks, primarily the Ĉekbanko esperantista. ... A currency is a unit of exchange, facilitating the transfer of goods and services. ... The Chi-Rho, a monogram of the first two letters in the Greek word for Christ Haddot Ardalone lili The New York Yankees team monogram Ecstacy commonly appears in a tablet form, usually imprinted with a monogram. ... Combatants Allied Powers: Russian Empire France British Empire Italy United States Central Powers: Austria-Hungary German Empire Ottoman Empire Bulgaria Commanders Nicholas II Aleksei Brusilov Georges Clemenceau Joseph Joffre Ferdinand Foch Herbert Henry Asquith Douglas Haig John Jellicoe Victor Emmanuel III Luigi Cadorna Armando Diaz Woodrow Wilson John Pershing Franz...

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.) The Sorbian alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet but uses diacritics such as the acute accent and the caron. ... The circumflex ( ˆ ) (often called a caret, a hat or an uppen) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Dutch, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Japanese romaji, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, Afrikaans and other languages, and formerly in Turkish [citation needed]. It received its English name from Latin circumflexus (bent... č ď Ä› Ǩ Ľ Å™ Å¡ ž A caron ( ˇ ), also known as wedge, inverted circumflex, inverted hat or by the Czech name háček (pronounced ), is a diacritic placed over certain letters to indicate present or historical palatalization or iotation in the orthography of Baltic languages and some Slavic languages, whereas some Finno-Lappic languages use it... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... The Łacinka alphabet (лацінка) is the variant of the Latin alphabet which was used for writing the Belarusian language. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... L. L. Zamenhof Dr. Ludovic Lazarus (Ludwik Lejzer, Ludwik Łazarz) Zamenhof (December 15, 1859 – April 14, 1917) was an eye doctor, philologist, and the initiator of Esperanto, the most widely spoken and successful constructed language in the world. ...

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 and Northern Europe, including Croatian, Icelandic, Slovenian, and Lithuanian, and are functionally identical to Polish and Russian. Compare the Esperanto forms with Croatian Vašington, Meksiko, and Gvatemala. In the case of "Mexico", the spelling Meksiko is found in languages as diverse as Indonesian, Turkish, and Swahili. Nickname: DC, The District Motto: Justitia Omnibus (Justice for All) Location of Washington, D.C., in relation to the states Maryland and Virginia Coordinates: Federal District District of Columbia  - Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D)  - City Council Chairperson: Vincent C. Gray (D) Ward 1: Jim Graham (D) Ward 2: Jack Evans... Swahili (also called Kiswahili; see below for derivation) is a Bantu language the most widely spoken language of sub-Saharan Africa. ...

Probably the most unusual appearance is the word cunamo for the Japanese word tsunami, this is because all Esperanto nouns end is -o and 'c' represents the 'ts' phoneme. This is almost identical to Slovak, Latvian and Bosnian cunami, and Lithuanian cunamis. The tsunami that struck Malé in the Maldives on December 26, 2004. ...

Non-printed variants

Signuno alphabet & numerals

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. Image File history File links Signuno (signed Esperanto) manual alphabet and numerals zero through ten. ... Image File history File links Signuno (signed Esperanto) manual alphabet and numerals zero through ten. ... 1922 Chart of the Morse Code Letters and Numerals Morse code is a method for transmitting information by using standardized sequences of variously spaced short and long elements for the characters and words in a message. ... PREMIER - first The information about the historic site of Safdarjung’s tomb in Delhi, India. ... Year 1920 (MCMXX) was a leap year starting on Thursday. ...

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. Fingerspelling (somtimes known as dactylology) is the representation of the letters of a writing system, and sometimes numeral systems, using only the hands. ... Signuno alphabet & numerals Signuno is signed Esperanto, derived from Gestuno roots and Esperanto morphology by an anonymous author. ... A logogram, or logograph, is a single grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). ... American Sign Language (ASL; less commonly Ameslan) is the dominant sign language of the Deaf community in the United States, in the English-speaking parts of Canada, and in parts of Mexico. ... The system of Roman numerals is a numeral system originating in ancient Rome, and was adapted from Etruscan numerals. ...

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-. L. L. Zamenhof Dr. Ludovic Lazarus (Ludwik Lejzer, Ludwik Łazarz) Zamenhof (December 15, 1859 – April 14, 1917) was an eye doctor, philologist, and the initiator of Esperanto, the most widely spoken and successful constructed language in the world. ...

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, or 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. Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations formed from the initial letter or letters of words, such as NATO and XHTML, and are pronounced in a way that is distinct from the full pronunciation of what the letters stand for. ... In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have a distinct meaning. ... In phonetics, phonation is the use of the laryngeal system to generate an audible source of acoustic energy, i. ...

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. It uses the vowel e after a consonant by default, but places the e before sonorants and voiceless fricatives; uses a as the vowel for <h> and the voiceless plosives, after the international names ha and ka for <h> and <k>; and uses the French name ĵi for <ĵ>, the Greek ĥi (chi) for <ĥ>, and the English ar for <r>. <V> has the vowel of ĵi (but the other voiced fricative, <z>, does not, to avoid the problem of it palatalizing.) The diphthong offglide <ŭ> is named eŭ, the only real possibility given Esperanto phonotactics besides aŭ, which as the word for "or" would be inappropriate. <M> is called om, as this alliterates well in the sequence l, m, n, o, p. There are other patterns of vowels: the lines start with a i a i and finish with a a e e. In the full ABC rhyme, the diacritic letters are placed at the end, where w, x, y are found in English, so as not to disrupt the pattern of letters many of us learned as children. All this makes the system more easily memorized than competing proposals. The modified Kalocsay abecedary is: Kálmán Kalocsay (October 6, 1891-February 27, 1976), in Hungarian name order Kalocsay Kálmán (pronounced ) is one of the foremost figures in the history of Esperanto literature. ... In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a member of a class of speech sounds that are continuants produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract. ... Phoneticians define phonation as use of the laryngeal system to generate an audible source of acoustic energy, i. ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ... A stop or plosive or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ...

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 two lines are:

plus cue, ex, wye,

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), A comma ( , ) is a punctuation mark. ...

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 periods or non-breaking spaces: 12.345.678,9 or 12 345 678,9. The decimal separator is used to mark the boundary between the integer and the fractional parts of a decimal numeral. ...

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. ? redirects here. ... an exclamation mark An exclamation mark, exclamation point or bang, !, is usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feeling. ... The inverted question mark and inverted exclamation point in Spanish are used to begin interrogative and exclamatory sentences, respectively. ...

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), an usage typical of the editions of Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda; the ampersand (&) is not found. Roman numerals are also avoided. A full stop or period (sometimes stop, full point or dot), is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of several different types of sentences in English and several other languages. ... Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations formed from the initial letter or letters of words, such as NATO and XHTML, and are pronounced in a way that is distinct from the full pronunciation of what the letters stand for. ... Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda (SAT; in English, World Anational Association) was founded in 1921 by Eugène LANTI. SAT is a world-wide worker movement active in socialist, peace, trade union, feminist and environmental issues. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... The system of Roman numerals is a numeral system originating in ancient Rome, and was adapted from Etruscan numerals. ...

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. A hyphen ( -, or ‐ ) is a punctuation mark. ...

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. For the Wikipedia quotation template, see here. ... Also called angle quotes, guillemets (<< or >>) are line segments, pointed as if arrows. ... This article is about colons in punctuation. ...

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 captitalized [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. For any word written in a language whose alphabet has distinct cases (such as the Latin, Greek, or Cyrillic alphabets), capitalization (or capitalisation) is the writing of a word with its first letter as a majuscule (upper case letter) and the remaining letters in minuscules (lower case letters). ...

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. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Backronym and Apronym (Discuss) Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and ABC, written as the initial letter or letters of words, and pronounced on the basis of this abbreviated written form. ... Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations formed from the initial letter or letters of words, such as NATO and XHTML, and are pronounced in a way that is distinct from the full pronunciation of what the letters stand for. ... TEJO is the Tutmonda Esperantista Junulara Organizo, or World Esperanto Youth Organization. ... A family name, surname, or last name is the part of a persons name that indicates to what family he or she belongs. ... Kálmán Kalocsay (October 6, 1891-February 27, 1976), in Hungarian name order Kalocsay Kálmán (pronounced ) is one of the foremost figures in the history of Esperanto literature. ...

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). CamelCase is the practice of writing compound words or phrases where the words are joined without spaces, and each word is capitalized within the compound. ... Proto-Esperanto (or pra-Esperanto in the language itself) is the modern term for any of the stages in the evolution of L. L. Zamenhofs language project, prior to the publication of his Unua Libro in 1887. ...

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

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). A diacritical mark or diacritic, also called an accent mark, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. ... L. L. Zamenhof Dr. Ludovic Lazarus (Ludwik Lejzer, Ludwik Łazarz) Zamenhof (December 15, 1859 – April 14, 1917) was an eye doctor, philologist, and the initiator of Esperanto, the most widely spoken and successful constructed language in the world. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ...

Unfortunately this method suffers from several problems:

1. h is already a consonant in the language, so digraphs occasionally make words ambiguous;
2. another source of amibiguity is that ŭ is changed to simple u, instead of using the available letter w or other unambiguous combination;
3. 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.

There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ...

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:

1. x is not a letter in the Esperanto alphabet, so its use introduces no ambiguity;
2. 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. 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".

The caret system

Another, less popular, system is the use of the caret character (^) to represent the diacritics, either before or after the letter to be accented. For example, ŝanco becomes ^sanco or s^anco. This shares the advantage of unambiguity with the x-system, and also has the advantage that the character itself resembles a circumflex accent, so that people unfamiliar with the system are likely to grasp what is meant. However, it has not caught on in many places, partially because it is regarded as aesthetically ugly, but also because it is cumbersome to type. It is primarily seen in introductions to Esperanto written in another language such as English, where introducing both the diacritics and the digraphs would be needlessly confusing. A caret in the Arial font Caret is the name for the symbol ^ in ASCII and some other character sets. ...

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

Many new Esperantists perceive the diacritics to be a problem, and often propose reforms to Esperanto orthography, sometimes with substantial modifications. 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 behaviour 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 makes it difficult for many to type the diacritics. This article is about the Internet meaning of the word flaming. For other meanings, and meanings of the word flame, see Flame. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... WWWs historical logo designed by Robert Cailliau The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents that runs over the Internet. ... Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ...

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: ISO 8859-3, also known as Latin-3 or South European is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... Windows Glyph List 4, or more commonly WGL4 for short, is a character set defined by Microsoft and containing 652 characters. ...

• C-circumflex: &#264;
• c-circumflex: &#265;
• G-circumflex: &#284;
• g-circumflex: &#285;
• H-circumflex: &#292;
• h-circumflex: &#293;
• J-circumflex: &#308;
• j-circumflex: &#309;
• S-circumflex: &#348;
• s-circumflex: &#349;
• U-breve: &#364;
• u-breve: &#365;

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). Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ...

Microsoft Windows: A page that describes how to use the excellent tool Keyman (free for personal use) in conjunction with a special (free) "keyword file" is available here. It can be configured to automatically run at startup. The advantage of using Keyman is that you can easily deactivate it, so your "abbreviations" (such as "cx," which are automatically converted to the corresponding Esperanto letter as you type) are not accidentally converted. Microsoft Windows is the name of several families of proprietary software operating systems by Microsoft. ...

A similar tool to Keyman is Ek, which is free for any use and wide used by Esperantists.

You can also use keyboard layout manager to define special keys: the most elementary thing is associating AltGr+g to ĝ and similar ones. The program has a simple and intuitive interface, but it may be necessary to define a new keyboard to avoid interference from Windows' system-file protection system, that may not permit modifications of important system files as keyboard drivers.

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. Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode created by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. ...

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. Linux (IPA pronunciation: ) is a Unix-like computer operating system family that uses the Linux kernel. ... Version is a state of an object or concept that varies from its previous state or condition. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... In computing, locale is a set of parameters that defines the users language, country and any special variant preferences that the user wants to see in their user interface. ... UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode created by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. ...

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: KDE 3. ... For the stock ticker symbol, see 4Kids Entertainment. ... Computers and other typing devices offer many different keyboard layouts for inputting data in different languages. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Combining character. ...

• 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.

In GNOME and GTK+ software, the installed input methods don't currently accept Esperanto key compositions (as of June 2006, Gnome 2.14 and Gtk+ 2.8). On many applications, however, one can use the standard X11 input method, by right-clicking on a text box, selecting "Input Methods" on the popup menu and then "X Input Method". Firefox is an example where this does not work, since it uses another popup menu instead of the default one. In these cases it's better to fall back to the difficult solution above. First introduced in 1960 by Bob Bemer, the backslash, , is a typographical mark (glyph) used chiefly in computing. ... The GNOME project is an international effort to create an easy-to-use computing platform built entirely from free software. ... The GIMP Toolkit—abbreviated, and almost exclusively known, as GTK+—is one of the two most popular widget toolkits for the X Window System for creating graphical user interfaces. ... An input method editor (IME) is a program or operating system component that allows computer users to enter complex characters and symbols (such as Japanese, Chinese, Tibetan and Korean characters), using a standard Western keyboard. ...

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). variant glyphs representing the character a (allographs of a) in the Zapfino typeface. ... Core fonts for the Web was a project started by Microsoft in 1996 to make a standard pack of fonts for the Internet. ... The term déjà vu (French: already seen, also called paramnesia) describes the experience of feeling that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously. ... The classic sentence using Vera Sans. ...

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 layout is active, Esperanto characters can be entered as follows: Mac OS X (official IPA pronunciation: ) is a line of proprietary, graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. ...

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

The option characters can be remembered by mnemonics: the 6 key contains the caret character, so option-6 places a caret over the following character. Option-b stands for breve.

Swedish Mac using Esperantists have the advantage of being able to use the Finnish Extended layout, which comes with the OS. Finnish has the exact same alphabet and type layout as Swedish and the extended layout adds functionality just like US Extended, only using other key combinations (the breve appears when you type option+y and the circumflex when you type a circumflex).

Locale

An Esperanto locale would use "." as the thousands separator and "," as a decimal point. 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. In computing, locale is a set of parameters that defines the users language, country and any special variant preferences that the user wants to see in their user interface. ...

Ŝava Alfabeto

While the majority of written Esperanto uses the Latin Alphabet (including the Esperanto Wikipedia), the Shavian alphabet (which was originally designed for English) has been modified for use in Esperanto. Since Esperanto writing is phonetic and there are no major accents, it is a fairly easy transliteration process. Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ...

See also

• orthography
• Ĉ, Ĝ, Ĥ, Ĵ, Ŝ, Ŭ

The orthography of a language is the set of symbols (glyphs and diacritics) used to write a language, as well as the set of rules describing how to write these glyphs, including spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ...

External links

• 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)