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 the ASCII
versions of this Project Gutenberg e-text.
However, in the discussion of the name "Washington", "W" and "sh" were
indeed used in the original document. "Esparanto" and "flexbility" were
also found in the original document and retained, along with a "than"
where a "then" was probably intended.
In addition, the 7-bit ASCII version of this book uses the German
"-e" convention to represent characters with umlauts. The 8-bit ASCII
version uses the ISO-8859-1 character set to represent these German and
Volapük characters. The HTML version uses Unicode and therefore displays
properly all the characters for the languages... including Esperanto!
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ESPERANTO
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HEARINGS
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
SIXTY-THIRD CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION