Esperanto alphabet facts for kids

The Esperanto alphabet is the alphabet which is used to write the Esperanto language. It has 28 (twenty-eight) letters.

The Esperanto alphabet is based on the Roman alphabet (which the English alphabet is also based on). Unlike the English alphabet, it does not have the letters q, w, x or y, but it has 6 (six) letters that use a diacritic (a special mark above a letter): ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ and ŭ.

Alternative writings

Because Esperanto uses letters with diacritics, there was (and sometimes still is) the need to write text in Esperanto even if the special letters are not available.

L. L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, proposed the so-called h-system (h-sistemo in Esperanto). Instead of diacritics, the letter h is added, with the only exception being ŭ. For example, ĝ becomes gh, ĥ becomes hh and ŭ becomes u. Words which appear to have a diacritic but do not actually can be "broken" with a hyphen or an apostrophe. For example, flughaveno (airport) becomes flug-haveno or flug'haveno.

Another system used to replace diacritics is the x-system (x-sistemo in Esperanto). The letter x is not used in the Esperanto alphabet, but it can be used to write diacritics. The x-system, unlike the h-system, does not treat ŭ differently from the other letters. For example, ĝ becomes gx, ĥ becomes hx and ŭ becomes ux. flughaveno remains the same, as there is no ambiguity.

Unicode and HTML

The whole Esperanto alphabet is part of the Latin-3 and Unicode character sets, and it is included in WGL4. The code points and HTML entities for the special Esperanto characters in Unicode are:

Criticism

Some people say that use of the diacritics (the letters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ) makes the language less natural than it would be using only the basic letters of Latin alphabet. The letters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ are not used in any other language in the world.

According to some people, the phonetic system of Esperanto is too similar to the Polish dialect of Białystok, home town of Zamenhof.

Several people consider using the Latin alphabet not to be neutral. In fact, many native languages on each continent (except for Antarctica) use the Latin alphabet to write: for example, German (Europe), Swahili (Africa), Vietnamese (Asia), Tahitian (Oceania), Cree (North America) and Apalaí (South America).

Images for kids

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  The Sm sign

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  Signuno alphabet

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  The Shavian alphabet adapted to write Esperanto: alphabet and ligatures

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  antaŭ kvar monatoj (four months ago) in the invented script from the TV series Resident Alien. Script reads right to left; u and v are not distinguished.

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  Ĉu vi parolas la rusan? (Do you speak Russian?) written in the Cyrillic script

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  An Esperanto pangram showing Laŭ Ludoviko Zamenhof bongustas freŝa ĉeĥa manĝaĵo kun spicoj. in the Juliamo alphabet.

See also

In Spanish: Ortografía del esperanto para niños