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):
?
,
?
,
?
,
?
,
?
and
?
.
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
?
. For example,
?
becomes
gh
,
?
becomes
hh
and
?
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 ? differently from the other letters. For example,
?
becomes
gx
,
?
becomes
hx
and
?
becomes
ux
.
flughaveno
remains the same, as there is no ambiguity.
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:
Character
|
Description
|
Code Point
|
HTML
|
?
|
C-circumflex
|
U+0108
|
Ĉ
|
?
|
c-circumflex
|
U+0109
|
ĉ
|
?
|
G-circumflex
|
U+011C
|
Ĝ
|
?
|
g-circumflex
|
U+011D
|
ĝ
|
?
|
H-circumflex
|
U+0124
|
Ĥ
|
?
|
h-circumflex
|
U+0125
|
ĥ
|
?
|
J-circumflex
|
U+0134
|
Ĵ
|
?
|
j-circumflex
|
U+0135
|
ĵ
|
?
|
S-circumflex
|
U+015C
|
Ŝ
|
?
|
s-circumflex
|
U+015D
|
ŝ
|
?
|
U-breve
|
U+016C
|
Ŭ
|
?
|
u-breve
|
U+016D
|
ŭ
|
Some people say that use of the diacritics (the letters ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?) makes the language less natural than it would be using only the basic letters of
Latin alphabet
.
[1]
The letters ?, ?, ?, ? 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.
[1]
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
Apalai
(South America).
- ↑
1.0
1.1
Rye, Justin B.
"Learn
not
to speak Esperanto"
. Archived from
the original
on 2005-10-30
. Retrieved
2015-10-03
.
(Dead link). Available in
De Araujo, Vitor (2013-07-06).
"Learn Not Not to Speak Esperanto"
. Retrieved
2020-01-15
.