Ok... I found Lernu and good information on Esperanto. I decided to take on Esperanto based on a thread in a message board I started here: http://www.cuplanet.com/index.php?/component/optio...

The message forum is about Cities Unlimited, a game in development that is to be like something from the SimCities series. I decided Esperanto would be a reasonable choice to replace what Simlish does for The Sims and SimCity: Socities.

Anyway, whatever reason I took to get here, I'm here. I have several issues, and I could use some help:

1) I couldn't find a keyboard layout for EASILY being able to do the special Esperanto letters on a EN-US QWERTY keyboard. I ended up making my own layout for Windows XP so I can do them. Since this was my own 'hack', this may have been done better by someone else. If so, I would like to get 'the better hack done by someone else'. Shift 6 makes a dead key out of ^, and then ^+ any special letter makes it with the circumflex or U with caron as appropriate. Nothing else is disturbed, though it all seems plenty disturbed already.

2) I printed out http://en.lernu.net/kursoj/gerda_malaperis/index.p... and I also fetched the .mp3s, though the .mp3s don't seem to QUITE mesh with the material I printed. It also appears I have the lesson that comes after the much more simple lesson that actually gets me started. I hope to locate the lesson before Gerda Malaperis I should have started with. I'm not clear how I managed to grab the wrong one.

3) This 'lesson before the lesson I have', I need something I can have in print AND have as an audio CD in the car so I can be working the two lessons together, all while tormenting my wife. Gerda Malaperis print and audio appears to almost do this, not quite. What am I missing? Where did I go wrong?

4) It may be useful to have someone who is well versed in both Usono (The American Anguish Language) and Esperanto to review the http://www.cuplanet.com/index.php?/component/optio... thread for any misunderstanding on my part of Esperanto, or anything I may have missed in my comments.

Thank you all for your time. I hope soon to be having these conversations in Esperanto. But I'm a ways off yet.

EDIT: Ack! Ok, I think I have what I was looking for. http://en.lernu.net/komunaj/elsxutajxoj/pdf/vkz_en... appears to be what I was looking for. A PDF/ MP3 pair of BEGINNER lessons. I'm not sure where I made the wrong turn. Dankon!

Romaq:1) I couldn't find a keyboard layout for EASILY being able to do the special Esperanto letters on a EN-US QWERTY keyboard.

On Windows XP (the OS you seem to be running), "Ek!" might be a good solution for you:

http://www.esperanto.mv.ru/Ek/index.html

It integrates with the OS, sits in the systray and it works well in most unicode-compatible applications. You don't have to change the keyboard layout, although Ek works with such an arrangement too.

I created a keyboard map for Esperanto that I use. It is available RIGHT HERE.

I have my machine set up to switch between the maps when I press CTRL-SHIFT, but the language bar I think lets you set up whatever key combo you like. After switching to the eo map, a number of the letters and punctuation marks will have been remapped. There are no dead keys - it's just a remapping.

So

Q = Ŝ
W = Ĵ
Y = Ĝ
X = Ĉ
: = Ŭ
" = Ĥ
{ = "
} = '
< = ;
> = :

I think that's all the remapping. Anyway, I've been using it for months now, and it works quite well.

Romaq:
4) It may be useful to have someone who is well versed in both Usono (The American Anguish Language) and Esperanto to review the http://www.cuplanet.com/index.php?/component/optio... thread for any misunderstanding on my part of Esperanto, or anything I may have missed in my comments.

It sounds as if you want to put some text in your game that is culturally neutral and meaningful, even if it's not necessarily comprehensible to most of the people playing the game. You can't avoid putting in the text (you don't want stop signs that are just red octagons, or store signs that are just pictures), and you don't want all the text to be nonsense characters or nonsense syllables. Have I got that right?

If this is what you're looking for, then Esperanto is a good choice. Fluency in any language is hard to get, but it's not necessary to study Esperanto for a long time in order to be able to start using it for communication. I started learning at the beginning of October, and by December I knew enough of the language to have a heated argument in Esperanto about the merits of bike helmets. YMMV, of course, but my guess is that it won't take you long before you're able to write street signs and newspaper headlines in Esperanto.

I'm not sure whether it's realistic to expect there to be highly active Esperanto Internet forums about your game. Nobody knows how many Esperanto speakers there are in the world. The number is probably between fifty thousand and two million. This is a lot more than any other planned language. But there are, for example, about 72 million native French speakers, 98 million native German speakers, and 322 million native English speakers, plus lots of people who have studied these languages as second languages. You can offer an Esperanto forum (why not?), but expect the ethnic-language forums to be more active.

If you're worried about Esperanto being "eurocentric," check out what Claude Piron has to say:

http://en.lernu.net/biblioteko/pri_esperanto/respo...

Feel free to email if you want to talk more.

Bear in mind, CUPlanet (And Monte Cristo) are not mine, I simply have to be persuasive on ideas I think should be seriously considered.

Yeah, there are two issues: 1) having 'ambiance' content, written and verbal in Esperanto as a way to avoid having to produce an American stop sign, a Canadian stop sign, a Mexican stop sign, and so on. In CityLife, you can see mailboxes, and newspaper stands, and in my version they are clearly American.

2) For SimCity4, there is a website known as SimTropolis, with a file exchange portion known as 'The STEX' (SimTrop file EXchange). It is English Only, but I also hope to stir up interest in getting 'a' custom content community centered around Esperanto the way Lernu.net appears to be so we may have an easier time getting a wider selection of custom content from an International community. There is a huge ongoing message thread concerning Asian custom content on SimTropolis, and where to get it and how to make sense of it. The big 'if', but what 'if' we used Esperanto as a linguistic equal meeting ground? Getting support for that has to start somewhere, and it would have to be before such a community became intensely active in actually making the content.

Rabhiuz, clicking on your name doesn't open a window or reveal your email. Mine is asmith@mik-maq.com. Private email would likely be better to coach me on approaching Esperanto on CUPlanet.

As to the layout, I will try mnlg's solution. I came across it, but I wasn't sure how well that one worked.

Thank you all for your time.

If you're worried about Esperanto being "eurocentric," check out what Claude Piron has to say:

I know this is a bit off topic, but I had to throw in my $0.02 on this one. I like what Piron says about Chinese and Esperanto. His oft-repeated argument about eksterlando = waiguren in Chinese also applies to the Japanese word "gaikokujin" so I have to agree with his logic. There is one argument I think he overlooks, however.

The main reason Esperanto is "Eurocentric" is because 99% of the words are cognates to other Indo-European languages. What's more, the majority of these are from the Germanic or Romance branches of that family. Now, I have heard adnauseum about how this makes the language more difficult for Chinese/Korean/Japanese speakers than for Europeans.

I can't argue with the logic here. The only thing I can do is add another question. What language would be easier for a Chinese or Japanese speaker to learn? Being English speakers, we obviously have an advantage over say, a Japanese person, if we wished to learn German. What language would the Japanese person have an advantage in learning over an English speaker?

I submit that there aren't many. You could make the argument that it would be easier to learn Chinese because of the similar writing system, but I disagree. I speak Japanese but can only read on a first grade level. When I started Chinese, I had no advantage whatsoever. I thought I would because of the similar "on-yomikata" (Japanese speakers will know what I mean) but it was not the case. I discovered those words were taken from many different Chinese dialects and their pronunciations were so altered as to be useless as cognates. What's more, the meanings and connotations of various characters were changed between the two languages to such a degree that this also proved to be of little help.

So, if there aren't many languages that provide cognates to aid Asian Esperantists, how is that different that any other world language they might choose to learn? The fact that the grammar is regular enough to aid learning and decrease memorization is argument enough, even with a lack of suitable Chinese/Japanese cognates.

I'd be very interested in knowing how others feel about this.