The Esperanto alphabet contains 28 characters. These are the
characters of English, but with "q", "w", "x", and "y" removed, and
six diacritical letters added. The diacritical letters are "c",
"g", "h", "j" and "s" with circumflexes (or "hats", as Esperantists
fondly call them), and "u" with a breve. Zamenhof himself suggested
that where the diacritical letters caused difficulty, one could
instead use "ch", "gh", "hh", "jh", "sh" and "u". A plain ASCII
file is one such place; there are no ASCII codes for Esperanto's
special letters.
However, there are two problems with Zamenhof's "h-method". There
is no difference between "u" and "u" with a breve, and there is no
way to determine (without prior knowledge of the word(s) involved,
and sometimes a bit of context) whether an "h" following one of
those other five letters is really the second half of a diacritical
pair, or just an "h" that happened to find itself next to one of
them. Consequently other, unambiguous, methods have been used over
the years. One is the "x-method", which uses the digraphs "cx",
"gx", "hx", "jx", "sx" and "ux" to represent the special letters.
There is no ambiguity because the letter "x" is not an Esperanto
letter, and each diacritical letter has a unique transliteration.
This is the method used in this Project Gutenberg e-text.
A COMPLETE
GRAMMAR OF ESPERANTO