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Diacritic in Esperanto (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ and ŭ)

by Orphneus, July 26, 2018

Messages: 10

Language: English

Orphneus (User's profile) July 26, 2018, 6:31:32 PM

Hy, I have two things I have been wondering about.

Why did Zamenhof decided to use circumflex (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ) and breve (ŭ), two different diacritics, instead of making it simpler and using just one.

I live in a Spanish speaking country and my keyboard allows me to write the circumflex but not the breve. I like the look of the accented leters more than the x and h system, so could I write the u with circumflex instead of with breve (ex. antaû, aûto, etc.), or is it frowned by the community.

Thanks in advance

sergejm (User's profile) July 26, 2018, 7:29:28 PM

I doubt your keyboard allows type ĉ ĝ ĵ ĥ ŝ - it allows type â ê û ô î - but not Esperanto circumflex letters, but may be you can enter č š - if you add Czech layout - but not ŭ.
Now I use Android to type Esperanto letters, it has Esperanto layout. But Windows does not have Esperanto layout and it is not easy enter Esperanto letters in Windows. Fortunately Windows can show Esperanto letters - they are present in Unicode.
Ŭ is with breve because Russian Й (i kratkoye) is writen with breve. Why was used circumflex with other letters I don't know.

Metsis (User's profile) July 27, 2018, 8:45:56 AM

Orphneus,

Vidu vian demandon en la hispana por mia klarigo de diakritaj signoj

Metsis (User's profile) July 27, 2018, 9:42:21 AM

All major operating system (MS Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android and Ios) has supported Unicode for a long time. Actually you can't buy these days a device, that would use something else. And that's good™. The only problem is, as sergejm pointed out, keyboard.

If your device has a virtual, on-screen keyboard, as telephones and tablets do, all you have to is to find a keyboard-program, that will change it to E-o. Further requirements may be, how easily you can switch between keyboards, because you probably will write also in something else than in E-o. There is a multitude of posts on this subject here in Lernu. Google for them.

For devices with a physical keyboard the issue is trickier. Alternatives are
  • find a keyboard with direct support for E-o
  • tune a keyboard to have key-caps with E-o letters and find or write a suitable keyboard program for it
  • use applications, that support typing special characters among them E-o letters
  • use a key capture application, that changes certain letter combinations to others in all programs
Finding an E-o keyboard or making such by yourself can be hard. Application specific combinations can be hard to use (e.g. MS Office Word has a way but it is clumsy), and there is no standard combinations, so the required keys to produce ,say, ĝ vary from application to application.

Using a key capture application, that works in all applications, is my preferred way. Mac has a built-in way to define text macros, but I use a commercial third-party software aText, which works IMHO better(*). In MS Windows I use a gratis software AutoHotkey with a definition file, that I have created myself. You can download it from my Dropbox (no registration required).

*: I am just a user, not otherwise involved with the company.

Roch (User's profile) August 4, 2018, 4:30:32 PM

I remember to have seen a suggestion to use the diacritical vowels to indicate the hatted letters....

eĥoŝanĝo ĉiuĵaŭde might have looked a bit like:


ehòsàngò cìujâude

Metsis (User's profile) August 6, 2018, 6:49:17 AM

Roch:I remember to have seen a suggestion to use the diacritical vowels to indicate the hatted letters....

eĥoŝanĝo ĉiuĵaŭde might have looked a bit like:

ehòsàngò cìujâude
I see a huge potential for FUBAR.

Britsushi (User's profile) August 24, 2018, 2:36:46 PM

I'm gonna use this topic to ask a question, if I may?

I'm a beginner (I started to learn 10 days ago), and I was just wondering how important it is to learn all the diacritic?
When I take note of the new vocabulary words I learn, I don't bother writing the accents but maybe I should? Does it make a difference in the grammar or the pronunciation?

MikeWortin (User's profile) August 24, 2018, 3:27:56 PM

it makes a lot of difference, for example

ĥoro means chorus and
horo means hour

Metsis (User's profile) August 24, 2018, 8:29:10 PM

Britsushi:
I'm a beginner (I started to learn 10 days ago), and I was just wondering how important it is to learn all the diacritic?
When I take note of the new vocabulary words I learn, I don't bother writing the accents but maybe I should? Does it make a difference in the grammar or the pronunciation?
In some languages the diacritics denote only, where the accent is (Spanish teléfono). In other the diacritics transform the letter to another letter (Swedish gäng and gång are two distinct words). English falls into the first category, even to the point where accents are usually omitted, because they are thought to denote accent only. Just as you did ridulo.gif

Only of the key principles in E-o is, that every individual phoneme is marked with one letter. Take an English word a "change" as example. It has a whiz-like sound in the beginning, a, n and a whirr-like sound in the end. The whiz is marked with letters "ch" and the whirr with "ge". E-o has a lot of loan-words from English and "change" is one of them, but the word has been esperantised to conform the principle above. In this case the result is ŝanĝo, which ,if you pronounce it, has a whiz, a, n, a whirr and an o to denote, that it's a noun.

So,like MikeWortin showed, words without diacritics are completely different. I leave it as an exercise to figure out, what ŝanĝo without diacritics mean.

Altebrilas (User's profile) August 24, 2018, 9:06:15 PM

Estis humura video pri tiu temo en Jutubo, sed mi ne plu memoras la nomon. Estis dum pikniko, kaj aferoj transformigis en ion preskaŭ samnoma... krom la diakritiko. Se iu havas la ligilon...

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