VIRO: “Cxu vi parolas Esperanton?”
KNABO: “Jes, kiel landano!”
Translated…
(Man: Do you speak Esperanto?
Boy: Yes, like a native!)
For the most part, Esperanto utilizes the standard Latinate character set. This means that the better fraction of its alphabet can be typed using your typical QWERTY keyboard. Unfortunately, you cannot type the entire alphabet using your normal keyset…There are a handful of straggler letters that are unique.
If you’ve been following this blog, you may have noticed the occasional “-x” in the middle of a word. Astute Esperantists will realize that there is no X in the Esperanto alphabet! I’ve been using what’s called x-coding, which you will often see in typed Esperanto documents. If you’re using a program like NotePad, where you cannot have characters outside of the English alphanumeric set, it is acceptable to use an “x” after an accented letter to indicate the accent. The e-texts on Project Gutenberg often do this, too! So, you’ll see…
Cx Gx Hx Jx Sx Ux
Where we cannot type the letter.
Some word processing programs have found a way around this problem. In OpenOffice, for example, there is a command under “Insert => Special Characters” that allows you to place Esperanto letters. It can be slow to constantly click through the menus to place those letters in the midst of a typing spree, but it results in authentic Esperanto characters!
If that does not suit your fancy, a free tool exists on the Internet called Esperantilo (-il-, you may remember, means “tool”). This program functions like an Esperanto word processor, complete with spell checking! Moreover, there is an option you can enable so that whenever you type an x-code letter, it automatically converts it into its Esperanto equivalent. Fast and effective!
At present, a large part of Esperanto literature consists of existing works that have been translated into Esperanto. A few gems can be found in e-text format from Project Gutenberg . There you can find Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical children’s story “Alice in Wonderland,” except it goes by “La Aventuroj de Alicio en Mirlando.” A good number of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s works appear on Project Gutenberg as well, including such classics as “Pupohejmo.” Even Mark Twain makes an appearance!
There are plenty of works available for free on the Internet. Additionally, there are a good number of works available for purchase. You’ll find a lot out there!
Esperanto has two similar prepositions, “de” and “da,” that mean two different things but are similar enough to trip up students of other languages. Having studied Spanish as my first excursion into foreign language, “de” and “da” manage to confuse me on occasion. We shall have a look at them here today.
“De” roughly means “from” or “of” in English. You use it in Esperanto to express origins, causes, properties of items (including possession), and on rare occasion, time.
Glaso de lakto – Glass of milk
Hundo de mi – My dog (literally, “dog of me” or “dog of mine”)
Li venas de la urbeto – He comes from the suburbs
“Da,” on the other hand, is used to express quantities and units of measurement. This is where students of Spanish might trip up. In my mind, when I hear “pint of water,” I jump to the Spanish word “de” due to its similarity to the Esperanto word. However, the preposition “da” is the appropriate one in this context.
Litro da akvo – Liter of water
Kilogramo da sukero – Kilogram of sugar
Practice using these two prepositions, and they’ll be easy to remember in no time at all!
Esperanto was not the first attempt at a universal language. There were a few ill-fated ventures throughout history. Mostly, they had the right idea, but simply did not connect with the human mindset.
My favorite example was Solresol, a curious language that used the seven notes of the musical scale. It came into existence a few years before Esperanto did, but was not quite as successful. Solresol used various combinations of the seven musical notes, called “syllables” in order to create nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech. If you truly wanted to, you could hum an entire Solresol sentence, or “speak” it on a piano or other instrument.
While it seemed like a good idea in theory, Solresol never fully caught on in popularity. One drawback to it was that there were not enough root words one could form in the Solresol system. While in Esperanto you know that any word that contains “vir-” has something to do with men or males, a Solresol word that contains the note “la” usually means a bunch of dissimilar things. Luckily, L.L. Zamenhof noticed this trend, and made Esperanto a highly consistent language!
