Esperanto Viva!

    Special letters in the Esperanto alphabet


    lingvo: no-bokmal

     Ĉ ĉ Ĝ ĝ Ĥ ĥ Ĵ ĵ Ŭ ŭ

    The Esperanto alphabet has 28 letters, including six letters which are not in general usage in the Internet (ie are not in ASCII).

    The special letters in Esperanto are:
    		C^ c^ - pronounced as in English ch in church
    G^ g^ - pronounced as in English g in George
    H^ h^ - pronounced as in English ch in Scottish loch.
    J^ j^ - pronounced as in English s in pleasure.
    S^ s^ - pronounced as in English sh in shipshape.
    U^ u^ - pronounced as in English w in cow.

    The Esperanto alphabet is included in Unicode (though it may be missing in some implementations), and in the older ISO Latin-3, which was specified by the International Standards Organisation for Esperanto, Maltese and Turkish. You'll find links to downloadable character sets at www.esperanto.be/tiparoj.html.

    There are several systems in use for transliterating special letters in Esperanto:

    C^ c^ G^ g^ H^ h^ J^ j^ S^ s^ U^ u^
    Circumflex first: ^C ^c ^G ^g ^H ^h ^J ^j ^S ^s ^U ^u
    Circumflex last: C^ c^ G^ g^ H^ h^ J^ j^ S^ s^ U^ u^
    x-convention: Cx cx Gx gx Hx hx Jx jx Sx sx Ux | Vx ux | vx
    h-convention: Ch ch Gh gh Hh hh Jh jh Sh sh U | W u | w

    Dr Zamenhof used the h-convention - but using 'u' rather than 'uh'. It's probably not a good idea for beginners to get used to writing 'u' without distinguishing it from the normal letter 'u', though. The h-convention is also awkward for automated text processing; a word such as chashundo [hunting dog] would be converted into c^as^undo [no meaning] rather than as c^ashundo.

    The most popular convention is cx, ux, etc. This could occasionally give problems with automatic text processing where foreign words, or names, are used. For instance, Chevaux would be converted to Chevau^. Alphabetic sorting invariably works, but one may occasionally come across contrived examples such as kaszono [till area] and kasxzono [hiding area] where the sorting order would be wrong.

    The convention of ^c, ^u derives from use of dead keys on manual typewriters adapted to Esperanto, but this has the disadvantage that Search / Find options on some software will not recognise the "^", and alphabetic sorting by ASCII does not work.

    Use of C^, c^ is similar to common usage in other languages ( e.g. German u", Welsh w^) and also follows the natural order in handwriting. Again, the find option on some software will not recognise the "^". Alphabetic sorting by ASCII code works well if sorting is by upper case only.

    Unicode and Latin-3 can cause some problems in web pages if the system character set is different. 'Select lists' may sometimes appear in the system character set rather than that that of the web page. There can also be problems in entering text into forms!
    Utgitt av Viva Languages.
    Oversatt av Stian Håklev.    		 (c) IDF 1996-2002
    lingvo: no-bokmal, laste kompilita: iso 2002 05 27 14:31:53 UTF