Esperanto orthography

The remaining six have diacritical marks: ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, and ŭ – that is, c, g, h, j, and s circumflex, and u breve.

In Zamenhof's writing, obstruents with different voicing do not meet in compound words, but rather are separated by an epenthetic vowel such as o, to avoid this effect.

So, for example, Winchester (the English city) is pronounced (and may be spelled) Vinĉester /vint͜ʃester/, as Esperanto ŭ does not occur at the beginning of ordinary words.

The script resembles Western Slavic Latin alphabets but uses circumflexes instead of carons for the letters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, and ŝ.

Also, the non-Slavic bases of the letters ĝ and ĵ, rather than Slavic dž and ž, help preserve the printed appearance of Latinate and Germanic vocabulary such as ĝenerala "general" (adjective) and ĵurnalo "journal".

Zamenhof took advantage of the fact that typewriters for the French language (which, in his lifetime, served as an international lingua franca for educated people) possess a dead key for the circumflex diacritic: thus, anyone who could avail himself of a French typewriter could type ĉ ĝ ĥ ĵ ŝ and their uppercase counterparts with no problem.

With the advent of personal computers, French-language keyboards still possess a dead-key ^, but whether it can be used to type Esperanto consonants may depend on the underlying software.

Zamenhof's choice of accented letters was familiar to the speakers of some Slavic languages, for instance, Czech and Slovak, where the sounds of Esperanto ĉ and ŝ are represented by the letters č and š, respectively; and Belarusian, because Esperanto ŭ bears the same relation to u as Belarusian Cyrillic ў bears to у.

Geographic names may diverge from English spelling, especially for the letters x, w, qu and gu, as in Vaŝintono "Washington, D.C.", Meksiko "Mexico City", and Gvatemalo "Guatemala".

The most common diacritic to be simplified is the circumflex, which often appears more like a macron or acute accent (e.g. ḡ or ǵ instead of ĝ).

Zamenhof simply tacked an -o onto each consonant to create the name of the letter, with the vowels representing themselves: a, bo, co, ĉo, do, e, fo, etc.

For example, several consonantal distinctions are difficult for many nationalities, who normally rely on the fact that Esperanto seldom uses these sounds to distinguish words (that is, they do not form many minimal pairs).

In addition, over a noisy telephone connection, it quickly becomes apparent that voicing distinctions can be difficult to make out: noise confounds the pairs po–bo, to–do, ĉo–ĝo, ko–go, fo–vo, so–zo, ŝo–ĵo, as well as the nasals mo–no.

The diphthong offglide ⟨ŭ⟩ is named eŭ, the only real possibility given Esperanto phonotactics besides aŭ, which, as the word for "or", could cause confusion.

The following words are sometimes seen: From a German–Esperanto dictionary by Erich-Dieter Krause:[6] A proposal by Simon Edward Adrian Payne in Monato:[7] A proposal by Gerrit François Makkink, in which most words are tetrasyllabic so that the syllable beginning with the letter in question receives secondary stress (though only in Varsovio do both stressed syllables begin with the letter):[8] The International League of Esperantist Radio Amateurs (ILERA) uses the following adaptation of the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet (ICAO and NATO "phonetic" alphabet): ILERA also modifies the numerals ses '6' and sep '7' to sis and sepen to make them more distinct, and uses the nominal form nulo for zero.

There are two common conventions for inputting and typesetting Esperanto in the ISO basic Latin alphabet when proper orthography is inconvenient.

[9] With the advent of computer word-processing, the so-called "x-system", with digraphs in x for all diacritics, has become equally popular:[citation needed] cx, gx, hx, jx, sx, ux.

The words ŝanĝi "to change" and ĵaŭde "on Thursday" are written shanghi, jhaude and sxangxi, jxauxde, respectively, in the two systems.

The h-system has a more conventional appearance, but because the letter x does not occur in Esperanto, it is fairly straightforward to automatically convert text written in the x-system into standard orthography; it also produces better results with alphabetic sorting.

As with most languages, punctuation is not completely standardized, but in Esperanto there is the additional complication of multiple competing national traditions.

Camel case, with or without a hyphen, may occur when a prefix is added to a proper noun: la geZamenhofoj (the Zamenhofs), pra-Esperanto (Proto-Esperanto).

Esperanto a e i o u take the letters for English /æ ɛ ɪ ə ɒ/, with more regard to graphic symmetry than phonetic faithfulness in the cases of o and u.

[14] The 2017 Japanese-language visual novel The Expression Amrilato and its 2021 sequel Distant Memoraĵo feature a language named Juliamo that is actually Esperanto in a modified Latin alphabet.