Frequently Asked Questions about Esperanto
Frequently Asked Questions about Esperanto
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Esperanto is a language designed to facilitate communication among
people of different lands and cultures. It was first published in 1887
by Dr. L. L. Zamenhof (1859-1917) under the pseudonym `Dr. Esperanto',
meaning `one who hopes', and this is the name that stuck as the name of
the language itself. Unlike national languages, Esperanto allows
communication on an equal footing between people, with neither having
the usual cultural advantage accruing to a native speaker. Esperanto
is also considerably easier to learn than national languages, since its
design is far simpler and more regular than such languages.
2. How many people speak Esperanto?
It is always difficult to measure the number of speakers of any
language; it is rather like estimating the number of people who play
Chess. Speakers of a second language vary widely in their competence
and fluency. The World Almanac, whose researchers actually conduct
interviews with speakers, estimate about two million speakers
worldwide. This puts it on a par with `minority' languages like
Icelandic and Estonian. Of course, unlike these other languages,
Esperanto is not the primary language for its speakers, although
there _are_ native speakers (`denaskaj parolantoj') of Esperanto
who learned to speak it (along with the local language) from
their parents.
3. Where do I find classes, textbooks, etc?
For U.S. residents, the Esperanto League for North America is the
best and most reliable source for Esperanto materials. They
offer a free basic correspondence course (about which we will
say more later), and may be offering a more detailed and advanced
paid correspondence course. They have an extensive catalogue
of books, including texts, reference, fiction, poetry, and
cassette tapes. Their address is
Esperanto League of North America
Box 1129
El Cerrito, CA 94530
A free information packet can be obtained from ELNA by
calling their toll-free information number: 1-800-828-5944
or by sending electronic mail to:
elna@netcom.com
(be sure to include your paper-mail address!)
A more immediate source of texts, especially for those with
access to a university, is your local library. The quality
of the books, of course, will vary widely, but most of the
texts, even the older ones, will provide a reasonable general
introduction to the language. One exception, mentioned here
only because it was surplused to _many_ libraries around the US,
is the US Army's `Esperanto: The Aggressor Language', which
is more of a curiosity than a useful textbook.
The problem with most old texts is that they are...well...old! Their
presentations can seem very bland and old-fashioned, and their
`cultural' information about the Esperanto community will often be
hopelessly out of date. The newest American textbook, and probably the
best, is Richardson's `Esperanto: Learning and Using the International
Language'. It is available from ELNA and perhaps some libraries.
Another book, the Esperanto entry in the `Teach Yourself ...' series of
language primers, is a slightly stodgy but very useful introduction to
the language. The `Teach Yourself' book can sometimes be found in
ordinary bookstores. There is also a `Teach Yourself' English/Esperanto
two-way dictionary that is a very popular and handy reference.
Another good, if a bit old-fashioned, textbook, Step by Step in
Esperanto, has recently been reprinted and is available from ELNA.
Still another book recommended by more than one participant is
`Saluton!' by Audry Childs-Mee. This is entirely in Esperanto, with
many pictures.
Macintosh owners with HyperCard and MacinTalk can take advantage
of an introductory HyperCard course on Esperanto. This is available
from ELNA for a nominal media charge, or can be downloaded
from the Sumex Info-Mac server. Swedish and Dutch versions
of this course have appeared in their respective countries.
***
*** If you know of other texts that should be mentioned here,
*** please let me know
***
Each summer, San Francisco State University and ELNA offer a three-week
curriculum of Esperanto courses, in which one may participate at
beginning, intermediate, or advanced levels, and earn three semester
credits. It is widely considered to be one of the best opportunities to
learn to speak Esperanto `like a native', and draws students and
faculty from around the world.
***
*** Further info, like details on Chaux-de-Fonds (sp?) activities
*** and similar international learning opportunities, are
*** requested
***
For those with relatively little time, a free Postal Correspondence
Course is available. You mail in each of ten lessons, and
a grader corrects your exercises and sends you the next lesson.
Send a self-addressed stamped envelope to
Esperanto Information Center
410 Darrell Road
Hillsborough, CA 94010
415 342-1796
In Australia:
Australia Esperanto-Asocio, GPO Box 313, Sunnybank, Queensland 4109.
Junulara Auxstralia Grupo Esperantista,
17 Renowden St., Cheltenham, Victoria 3192.
Book service: PO Box 230, Matraville, NSW 2036.
Correspondence Course: J. Moore, 7 Pelican St., Emu Park, Queensland 4702.
In Canada:
Kanada Esperanto-Asocio (English course)
P.O.Box 2159, Sidney, BC V8L 3S6
Esperanto-Societo Kebekia (French course)
6358-A, rue de Bordeaux, Montreal, QC H2G 2R8
Book Service
6358-A, rue de Bordeaux, Montreal, QC H2G 2R8
In New Zealand:
New Zealand Esperanto Association (also correspondence course)
PO Box 41-172, St Lukes, Auckland
In Britain:
British Esperanto Association, 140 Holland Park Avenue, Londonw W11
In France:
UFE (Union Francaise pour l'Esperanto)
and its youth section JEFO (Junulara Esperantista Franca Organizo)
4 bis, rue de la Cerisaie
75004 PARIS
In The Netherlands:
ECN (Esperanto Centrum Nederland)
Riouwstraat 172, NL-2585 HW Den Haag, tel. +31 70 3556677
****
**** If you think YOUR country should be listed here, let me know...
****
The Free Correspondence Course is also available online as the
Free Esperanto Course. Information is posted regularly to this group.
The Correspondence Course is now conducted in English, French, and German
versions.
4. How do you type Esperanto's circumflexed letters?
Esperanto has five circumflexed consonants (c, g, h, j, and s can all
be circumflexed) and an accented vowel (u with breve). The Fundamento,
which forms the official basis for the language, suggests that printers
that lack a circumflex can use `h' (ch, gh, hh, etc.). This is,
however, not a completely satisfactory solution for computers, and
introduces unnecessary lexical ambiguity. Two solutions are now in
current use:
The European Computer Manufacturer's Association Standard ECMA-94
contains four 8-bit Latin alphabets to cover a variety of European
languages. Latin alphabet 3 covers Esperanto (as well as nine other
European languages). This alphabet also forms the basis for the
international standard coding ISO 8859-3 (LATIN-3). This eight-bit
coding is probably the best `canonical' representation for the storage
of Esperanto text, although it is inconvenient for sorting
applications (this is a common technical difficulty for almost all
languages). A more immediate problem is that the Internet mail
protocol is currently only able to transmit 7-bit ASCII. Finally, it
may be inconvenient to generate the eight-bit codes on particular
input devices.
Various `ASCIIzations' of the accented letters are popular. Some
people type a circumflex before the accented letter; others type it
afterwards. Some use a `<' sign instead. Some use the Fundamentan
formula with following `h'. Others follow with a `~' (tilde) to
facilitate alphabetization.
The best ASCIIzation is probably to use following `x', which has
several advantages: the `x' is not part of the Esperanto alphabet and
so the digraphs like `cx' can automatically be translated to Latin-3
codes or other representations; `x' is alphabetic, so various editing
and text-processing programs treat `accented' words as single units;
since `x' is near the end of the alphabet, sorting algorithms are quite
reliable when applied to words coded in this way. Finally, combinations
like `sx' are rare in English, so automatic conversion of mixed
Esperanto/English text is highly reliable. While nobody can
dictate a standard, widespread adoption of this convention on the
networks would facilitate the development of standard programs to
convert or display the accented characters, at least until 8-bit
mail transmission becomes commonplace.
Esperanto's circumflexed characters are covered by the incipient `wide
character' standards (Unicode and ISO 10646), so Esperantists will not
be left out if and when those standards are widely adopted and
implemented. Unicode is a widely endorsed 16-bit character encoding
expected to be supported by Microsoft's Windows NT and Apple's
QuickDraw GX system software.
5. How do I display those characters on a (Mac, PC, etc.)
`Dumb' terminals generally cannot overstrike accents with arbitrary
characters, and so cannot display the Esperanto characters. Most
modern equipment uses `softer' display technology and can display the
Esperanto characters given proper software.
On the Macintosh, one can prepare and display text with an Esperanto
`font'; such fonts usually match the accented characters to convenient
(USA) keyboard equivalents, rather than to standard binary codes. A
couple of such fonts (Imagewriter resolution) are available on ELNA's
HyperCard disk, and Esperanto versions of Helvetica and Times (in
Type 3 PostScript) are also obtainable through ELNA and via anonymous
FTP from ftp.stack.urc.tue.nl.
*
* INFORMATION SOLICITED ON OTHER MACINTOSH FONTS
*
WordPerfect 5.1 allows the display of Esperanto characters when the
512-character screen is selected from the Setup menu. To type an
accented character, type control-v, the charactrs.doc table number,
comma, the character code, and RETURN. The Esperanto codes are all in
table 1, with the following values:
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ - -
C:100 c:101 G:122 g:123 H:126 h:127 J:140 j:141 S:180 s:181 U:188 u:189
so that you type <CTRL-V>1,100<RETURN> to get circumflexed C.
You can set up a `keyboard file' to assign these combinations
to keys. (thanks to Cleve Lendon and Michael Johnson for this information)
In Word Perfect 5.1, you can also type <CTRL_V> followed by
the character and the accent mark; thus <Ctrl-V>C^ gives C-circumflex.
Two problems are: the lowercase circumflexed j looks lousy in most fonts
and there is no breve on the keyboard, so u-breve cannot be done this way.
(thanks to D. Gary Grady for this information)
Two programs, `vidi' and `montru', which can display some of the common
Esperanto ASCIIzations as accented characters on PCs with graphics
boards, are available via anonymous FTP (see below).
On Unix (and other) systems running X11, it is possible to create a
text font using the ISO 8859-3 encoding. With such a font in your
server's font repertoire, an `xterm' window (with terminal modes set
for 8-bit output) can display Esperanto text using standard Unix
commands such as `cat'. An ISO 8859-3 font is included in
the contributed software portion of Release 5 of X11. The Esperanto
versions of Helvetica and Times for the Mac might be usable with
a suitably equipped X11 server -- since they are Adobe Type 1
fonts -- but this has yet to be verified.
GNU Emacs Version 19 is able to deal with arbitrary X11 keyboard
inputs and output fonts. It can be obtained from the usual GNU
sources (e.g. prep.ai.mit.edu). There is also a version of GNU Emacs,
known as MULE, that is able to handle several non-ASCII encodings,
including Latin alphabets 1 thru 9 (except 8) and several Asian
languages. It comes with X11 fonts for all these alphabets, including
ISO 8859-3. Sources are in several places; try world.std.com in
src/gnu/mule.
In any of these cases, a certain amount of data massaging may be
necessary to convert some particular representation of Esperanto text
(see Question 4) to an appropriate form.
Text processing languages like TeX and Troff permit the arbitrary
placement of diacriticals on characters and so make the preparation of
good-looking Esperanto documents quite easy. TeX's Computer Modern
fonts are particularly good for this, because they include an undotted
`j' character. Note that the hyphenation algorithms used by TeX and
Troff are not intended for Esperanto and may produce unpleasant
results. TeX is available, often as free software, for a variety of
computers.
6. What about other `artificial' languages like Loglan, Ido, etc.?
People create languages for a variety of purposes. J.R.R. Tolkien's
languages of Sindarin and Quenya, for example, were created partly as
a recreation, and partly to fulfill a literary purpose. Many languages
have been created as international languages; only Esperanto has
continued to grow and prosper after the death of its originator. Many
of the people who have attempted to promulgate international languages
more `perfect' (i.e., more `international', more `logical', or
whatever) than Esperanto have failed to understand that -- given a
certain minimum standard of internationality, aesthetic quality, and
ease of learning -- further tinkering not only fails to substantially
improve the product, but interferes with the establishment of a large
community of speakers. A language like, say, Interlingua might be (by
some individual's criteria) `better' than Esperanto, but in order for
it to be worth uprooting the established world of Esperanto and
creating an equivalently widespread world community of Interlingua
speakers, it would have to be visibly and profoundly an improvement
over Esperanto of prodigious proportions. No international language
project has yet produced such an obviously ideal language.
In the network community, one of the best known planned language
projects is James Cooke Brown's Loglan (and its revised offshoot
Lojban). While some enthusiasts do see Loglan and Lojban as
competitors to Esperanto, the languages were conceived not as a tool to
facilitate better communication, but as a linguistic experiment, to
test the Whorf hypothesis that a language shapes (or limits) the
thoughts of its speakers. They are thus deliberately designed to bear
little resemblance to existing human languages. While Loglan and
Lojban are unlikely (and, by design, perhaps unsuited) to succeed as
international languages, both are interesting projects in their own
right. The address to write for Loglan information is
The Loglan Institute
3009 Peters Way
San Diego, CA, 92117
U.S.A.
[ (619) 270-1691 ]
70674.1434@compuserve.com
For Lojban, contact
Bob LeChevalier, President
The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane Fairfax VA 22031-1303
U.S.A
[ (703) 385-0273 (day/evenings) }
lojbab@access.digex.net
To subscribe to a LOJBAN mailing list, send a message to
listserv@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu
consisting of the body line (not subject):
subscribe lojban Your Real Name
Lojban information can be found via anonymous FTP at ftp.cs.yale.edu
in the /pub/lojban directory.
Those interested in the Mark Okrand's `Klingon' language can
join a mailing list; contact
tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
to be added or to get information.
There is a general `constructed language' mailing list; send a message
to
listserv@diku.dk
consisting of the body line (not subject):
subscribe conlang Your Real Name
to subscribe.
Finally, fans of Tolkien's language creations
can join a Tolkien-language mailing list. Contact
jcb@dcs.edinburgh.ac.uk
for information. (UK readers invert the address appropriately)
As for our own Esperanto newsgroup, many readers are interested in other
planned languages, and discussion of these can often be informative and
interesting. But politeness dictates that `Esperanto-bashing' in
an Esperanto forum is inappropriate and should be avoided.
7. How come Esperanto doesn't have <favorite word or feature>?
Although Esperanto is a planned language, it has developed well beyond
the point at which some authoritative person or group can dictate
language practice, however great the temptation may be to `tinker' with
the language. For example, many people are critical of the presence of
a feminine suffix and absense of a corresponding masculine suffix, and
have suggested masculine suffixes (-icx, -un, -ucx, -ab), neutral pronouns
(sxli, ri), and/or re-interpretations of familiar words such as
redefining `frato' (brother) to mean `sibling'. But there is no single
individual or committee that will simply designate changes such as
these before they achieve general use.
Just as with any other language, the only way for such novelties to
attain acceptability is for them to be used in correspondence,
literature, and conversation by a growing number of people. So, if
you see a genuine lack in the language's existing stock of roots and
affixes, by all means use a new coinage (and ALWAYS with suitable
explanation, since you are not using standard Esperanto) and see if it
catches on. Be warned that such neologisms are often controversial
and will meet with criticisms (in proportion to the extent to which
they break with the `Fundamento' or to which they are redundant to the
existing language).
8. Is there any Esperanto material available online?
Note: This information is not exhaustive. Check Martin Weichert's
`Yellow Pages' (Flavaj Pagxoj; see below) for more complete and
up-to-date information.
There used to be a Planned Languages Server at columbia.edu , but
it is, apparently, no longer available.
An Anonymous FTP archive has been set up at ftp.stack.urc.tue.nl
(131.155.140.128) in /pub/esperanto ; non-Internet users can retrieve
material via email: send the following message to ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com:
connect ftp.stack.urc.tue.nl
reply YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS_HERE
dir pub/esperanto
get pub/esperanto/UPLOAD-INFO.ALSXUTO-INFO
get pub/esperanto/READ-ME.LEGU-MIN
quit
(binary files require more work; send `help' to ftpmail for info)
Another (older?) copy of this material can be found buried at
src.doc.ic.ac.uk, in
/media/literary/collections/Online-Book-Initiative/Esperanto
An FTP archive has been set up by ELNA at ftp.netcom.com in /pub/elna .
An experimental FTP archive with material from the Akademio Internacia
de la Sciencoj and a rough version of a glossary of mathematical
terminology may be found at cfgauss.uni-math.gwdg.de (directory ILo).
Contact: Hoso HOLDGR"UN <holdgrun@cfgauss.uni-math.gwdg.de>
The FTP archives, as well as some other materials, are
available through Gopher via the gopher server at otax.tky.hut.fi
(130.233.32.32) port 70 (Helsinki University of Technology).
WWW (xmosaic) users can find an Esperanto section in an _experimental_
WWW server under URL
http://utis179.cs.utwente.nl:8001/esperanto/
Use at your own risk, and please do not overuse it. (xmosaic users
can get there by typing the URL given above in the `Open' dialog box.
Some libraries have on-line listings of their Esperanto holdings. On
Internet, try:
University of California (450 titles): telnet melvyl.ucop.edu
(195.35.222.222)
Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen (234 titles): telnet kunlb1.ubn.kun.nl
(131.174.81.246)
Universitaet des Saarlandes (>1000 titles): telnet unisb.rz.uni-sb.de
(134.96.100.100)
.a logon ub,ub
(this site is also available via Gopher)
Derk Ederveen <derk@saluton.hacktic.nl> maintains a list of
network addresses of Esperanto speakers and organizations. Please
contact him if you speak Esperanto but do not yet appear on the list.
The list is available from most Esperanto archives and is updated monthly.
Also, see the next section's information about the Esperanto Lingva Servo,
and about the `Flavaj Pagxoj'.
9. In what language should people post to this newsgroup/list?
This is left up to the judgement of the sender, based on his or her
language expertise, the nature of the material, and the time available
for composing the message. Several of our readers are not native
speakers of English; for some, it is easier to read and write Esperanto
than English. On the other hand, many of our readers have only the
most basic exposure to Esperanto (and wish to learn more). The best
solution would be to post bilingually in English and Esperanto (if you
know Esperanto), but of course that requires composing the posting two
times. Messages involving details of Esperanto culture (such as a
recent thread involving some of the personalities of the early
Esperanto movement) can probably be entirely in Esperanto without
losing much of the intended audience. Similarly, messages likely to be
of interest to people who are just learning about Esperanto should be
posted in English (at least).
Beginners in the language should not be afraid to attempt to post in
Esperanto; people are happy to correct language mistakes in a positive
and friendly way (not as `grammar flames') and a forum like this can be
a good way to get language practice. No, this is not strong enough.
Beginners are ESPECIALLY ENCOURAGED to post in Esperanto whenever
possible.
Of course, if you are uncertain of your Esperanto ability, you should
include an English version of your text so that, if you make a serious
language blunder, people can determine what you were *trying* to say.
One service that might be of use is the Language Service (La
Lingva Servo), a group of volunteers who will correct the grammar
of short Esperanto postings. Information on the Lingva Servo,
with the current list of volunteers, is posted monthly to this
group.
If you are cross-posting articles to other newsgroups, please
do NOT post in Esperanto, unless English (or the usual language
of that newsgroup) is also included, preferably as the primary
language. Aside from being rude, such postings have tended to
create a lot of unwanted crossposted response traffic, usually
of an anti-Esperantan inflammatory nature. Similarly, while
it may sometimes be appropriate to mention Esperanto in other
newsgroups, continued discussion of Esperanto in inappropriate
groups like comp.lang.c will generate more heat than light, and
should be avoided.