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Writing Esperanto

by 240-843-895, August 12, 2005

Messages: 15

Language: English

240-843-895 (User's profile) August 12, 2005, 8:13:14 PM

It's obvious that you write Esperanto with the Roman alphabet. But, can you write it in other scripts? Like Greek, Cyrillic, Kanji, Kana, etc.?

240-843-895 (User's profile) August 21, 2005, 7:33:10 AM

?

trojo (User's profile) August 22, 2005, 2:35:37 AM

I believe that students of Esperanto must all also learn Esperanto's alphabet, regardless of what alphabet their native language happens to use. Having a writing system in common is just as important for the purpose of international intercommunication as having a spoken language in common, obviously.

And not all of the world's writing systems are capable of representing the sounds and sound combinations of Esperanto anyway. How would one spell kvar in the Japanese writing system for example? How would one spell iliaj or ĉie in Hebrew?

Mi kredas, ke ĉiuj lernantoj de Esperanto devas ankaŭ lerni la alfabeton de Esperanto, malgraŭ kiun ajn alfabeton ilia gepatra lingvo uzas. Evidente, havi skribsistemon komunan estas tiel grave kiel havi parolan lingvon komunan por la celo de internacia interkomunikado.

Kaj ĉiukaze, ne ĉiuj skribsistemoj de la mondo povas signifi la sonojn kaj sonkombinaĵojn de Esperanto. Kiel oni literumus la vorton "kvar" en la Japana skribsistemo ekzemple? Kiel oni literumus la vortojn "iliaj" kaj "ĉie" Hebree?

piteredfan (User's profile) August 23, 2005, 12:10:35 AM

Esperanto uses a modified Latin alphabet. Of the other alphabets, Cyrillic seems to offer some advantages, having separate sybols for c and ĉ, s and ŝ, j and ĵ, but I don't know whether it has ĝ, h, and ŭ.

Zamenhof first wrote in Russian. Did he ever consider using Cyrillic script rather than Latin?

I'm a bit more familiar with Greek. It is unsuitable because it has only eighteen consonants, of which theta and psi sre not used in Esperanto. The superscipted letters are missing. Beta is b or v. Gamma is g or j.

 Amike,

piteredfan

240-843-895 (User's profile) August 23, 2005, 12:13:54 AM

Cyrillic I'm sure has all the sounds of Esperanto.

logixoul (User's profile) August 24, 2005, 12:03:10 PM

I prepared a cyrillic-esperanto table. It corresponds to the use of the characters in my language, Bulgarian. Other languages using the cyrillic alphabet may have different phoneme-grapheme relationships.

a а

b б

c ц

ĉ ч

d д

e е

f ф

g г

ĝ дж

h no_equivalent

ĥ х

i и

j й

ĵ ж

k к

l л

m м

n н

o о

p п

r р

s с

ŝ ш

t т

u у

ŭ no_equivalent

v в

z з

 

But what's the point in it? I thought the goal was unification of comunication, not allowing everybody to write in his native tongue's alphabet... no?

sarcasmdude1292 (User's profile) August 25, 2005, 5:14:34 PM

If everyone only wrote in his/her own alphabet, that would mean that anyone wanting to communicate would have to learn a multitude of new (alphabets, not very efficient.) part in parentheses was editted 

logixoul (User's profile) August 25, 2005, 8:03:10 PM

sarcasmdude1292 skribis:

If everyone only wrote in his/her own alphabet, that would mean that anyone wanting to communicate would have to learn a multitude of new languages.

Exactly...

240-843-895 (User's profile) August 26, 2005, 8:12:27 AM

Okay, but is there Esperanto shorthand...?

logixoul (User's profile) August 26, 2005, 9:27:18 AM

One could use any shorthand to write Esperanto. Obviously the X-system could be used for that. But, to my knowledge, there is no standard E-o shorthand currently.

Oni povas uzi io steno por skribi Esperanto. Evidente la X-sistemo povas uzigas por tio. Sed, en mia scio, ne estas norma E-o steno nun.

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