Alphabet of Esperanto

The Esperanto is written using 28 letters, from which 22 come directly from the Latin alphabet basic, and of which the 6 others, exits also of this base, are decorated of an accent. Each one of these 28 letters, accentuated or not, is a letter with whole share, having its place in the alphabetical order and its entry in the dictionaries.

The existence of these accented accentuated letters is justified by the fact that, in the European languages, the pronunciation of the same letter is not the same one in all the languages. For example, the German word “  ingenieur  ” decides with a G hard (transcribed by in the International Phonetic Alphabet), whereas the same letter of the French word “  ingénieur  ” decides and that in English, in “  engineer  ”, she decides. If it is wanted that the pronunciation of the letter G is always the same one in Esperanto (what is very important for the facility of memorizing of the words), it is necessarily necessary to choose one or the other of the existing pronunciations in the vernacular languages (or " naturelles"). The solution chosen in Esperanto was to create several versions of the same letter by distinguishing them by a particular symbol: The language thus has of the letter G which decide and the letter ĝ which decides. That allows a greater richness of sounds in the language, while leaving a writing relatively close to those of the vernacular languages. Thus, the word “engineer” is written “inĝeniero” and decides.

In spite of their justification, these additional letters do not exist in any other language, and that posed problems of typography and data processing. Therefore the built languages created starting from Esperanto (Ido) or on other bases (Interlingua) put in their schedule of conditions to stick to with the basic, even if it means Latin alphabet giving up for that a completely phonetic writing. But this problem of typography that also certain vernacular languages met little spread, is on the way to be completely solved by the use of Unicode.

Alphabet

The letters of Esperanto are identical to those of the International Phonetic Alphabet, except for the letters C , ĉ , ĝ , ĥ , ĵ , ŝ and ŭ .

Pronunciation

The complete alphabet comprises 28 letters; all are always marked (the dumb letters do not exist) and the alphabet is perfectly phonetic (each letter corresponds to a phoneme and each phoneme corresponds to a letter).

The name of each vowel is simply consisted of the vowel itself: has , E , etc the name of the consonant is obtained simply by adding a " o" with this consonant: bo , Co ,… ŭo , zo .

The ŭ is a consonant especially employed in the groups aŭ (like aou' known as ) and eŭ (like al' éou' tien ).

The letters Q , W , X and are not used there in Esperanto, except in the mathematical expressions. In this case, their names decide: Q - kuo W - duobla vo X - ikso Y - I greka

Substitutions

In typography, if one does not have the accented accentuated letters of Esperanto, it is necessary to use substitutions. It is not acceptable to completely omit the accents without distinguishing from the normally different letters.

The system H

The method of substitution suggested by Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, the initiator of the language, is to replace the letters with accent by the corresponding letters without accent followed by the letter H , except for the ŭ which, replaced by a U without accent, does not cause a serious problem of comprehension:
  • ser' ĉ I (to seek) → ser ch' I
  • man' ĝ I (to eat) → man gh' I
  • ĥ irurgio (surgery) → hh irurgio
  • ĵ urnalo (newspaper) → jh urnalo
  • ŝ uo (shoe) → HS uo
  • malgra' ŭ (in spite of) → will malgra u'

The system X

At the time of the code ASCII was created various other methods, of which most popular is the method-X . The letter X , is not used in the words in Esperanto, thus takes the place of the H and one also uses it after the ŭ . By this method it is possible to use effective automatic converters with more than 99%, whereas the treatment with the system H ridges on words like flughaveno , will longhara , dishaki , chashundo , etc, or the H is a letter with whole share and not the substitute of accent of the letter which precedes it.

  • ser' ĉ I → ser cx' I

  • man' ĝ I → man gx' I
  • ĥ irurgio → hx irurgio
  • ĵ urnalo → jx urnalo
  • ŝ uo → sx uo
  • malgra' ŭ → will malgra ux'

" Sxangxigxi" (“to change”) is an example where the number of X is used as argument to the opponents of the system. (Let us note that the number of X is the same one as the number of accents in the orthodoxe writing ŝanĝiĝi .) Let us recall that this system is before very useful for the typewriters.

Unicode

But maintaining the Unicode tends to spread and one can write more and more easily, directly by computer, the accented accentuated letters of Esperanto. Thus the use of substitutions starts to disappear.

In HTML, these codes preceded by & # and followed by a semicolon generate the accented accentuated letters of Esperanto; in " Visual Basic" (used for the macros of Word), these codes are used as argument of chrW (), etc

  • example: Ŝ is obtained by & #348; in HTML, by chrW (348) in V.B. …

Converters

There exist converters making it possible to go simply from one system to the other. Thus on the site of the Fédération Espérantiste of Work one can find a converter of system X in Unicode: http://fetesperanto.lautre.net/sistemox.php3.

See too

External bonds

  • Listen to the alphabet in Esperanto.

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