Sensupersigna Esperanto

Or how easily Esperanto could have (had) an alphabet without diacritics

Introduction

(...) no matter how often and how vigorously Esperantists try to justify and defend the idiosyncratic accented letters, people continue to object to (and even reject) them. I agree with this objection more than all others. I have been around the auxiliary language movement for years, and it is my considered opinion that the E-o accented letter are a nuisance and a bother and are a genuine hindrance to further acceptance of the language. They are more trouble than they are worth. They need to be replaced if E-o is to get out of the realm of a hobby language and into the realm of a genuine international auxiliary language.
— Paul O. Bartlett @ europa.linguas (2003-01-26).

When building Esperanto, its author, Zamenhof, intended to make the language as much logical and irregularity-free as possible. As for the alphabet, he considered that it was illogical that single sounds were represented by different spellings, and that single letters had different sounds.

So, Zamenhof discarded some "useless" letters of the Roman/English alphabet and added some other brand-new letters with diacritics, so that in the alphabet of Esperanto "every sound is represented by only one letter, and every letter represents only one sound". The alphabet is as follows:

a b c ĉ d e f g ĝ h ĥ i j ĵ k l m n o p r s ŝ t u ŭ v z

Unless your computer system has Unicode support, you won't be able to view above the six special letters introduced by Zamenhof: The letters c, g, h, j and s with a circumflex, and the letter u with a brachia over it (the lower half of a circumference).

Even if you are able to view the letters, probably your computer doesn't include a method to instantly insert those letters while typing a text. For instance, pressing the key Alt Gr and then the c key to get the ĉ character in Windows.

A problem and its many workarounds

On chat rooms, e-mail messages and web pages, you will see people using alternative ways to represent those letters.

One of them is placing a circumflex character beside the "base" letter, either before or after it (tilde for u):

Zamenhof himself considered that the lack of the proper types when trying to print texts in Esperanto could be a problem, so he stated that one could replace the special letters by:

However, this convention enables some conflicts: when you see a ch combination, for example, you have to find out whether it stands for a real ĉ character, or for a casual c-h encounter (as in pachoro = pac-horo, peace-hour). Similarly, u stands for both u and ŭ.

Over the Internet, many people use another convention, taking advantage of the "free" Roman letter x:

This allows for quick typing and generates no conflicts as above, but in change it gives a totally weird look to a text in Esperanto. By meeting a word spelled "cxirkauxajxo" a potential learner is more likely to run away.

Day after day after day users of Esperanto use one of these methods to represent the "real" Esperanto letters, that they can't type comfortably without installing special software.

Sensupersigne...

Zamenhof could have easily devised another alphabet for Esperanto, taking a more reasonable advantage of the 26 Latin letters available on a standard computer/typewriter keyboard and nothing else. In this page, I present TWO such alphabets that I have devised myself:

(* Alternatively, one could use cx for ĉ: c+ŝ sounds like ĉ.)

And here is the other:

(* Alternatively, one could use tj for ĉ: t+ĵ sounds like ĉ.)

Note that these collections of two letters are not to be regarded as "one letter". While in current Esperanto x-system sx is to be regarded as one letter, sj in these proposals is in fact the juxtaposition of two different letters, it must come after si and before sk in alphabetical sorting.

Samples

"An image is worth a thousand words." Here follows two samples of re-spelled "sensupersigna" (without diacritics) Esperanto according to each proposal. You'll see that, though the reform may seem rather radical, it doesn't impact that much the look of a text in Esperanto.

Analysis?

Some Esperantists go to great lengths to defend the diacritics of Esperanto. I have learned that (as of 2003-01-28) this proposal of mine is cited in another page, and "analysed" along with two other proposals of alphabet reform. First the author focuses on all the trouble involved in changing the alphabet:

All of these systems (which contradict each other) would break Esperanto's unity, and would seem to lead mainly to contradictions, confusion, and lack of continuity — plus a loss of credibility in the eyes of the world. (...) they do not train the eye and brain to recognise ordinary standard Esperanto, thus separating their users from the world's Esperanto inscriptions, magazines and the thousands of translated and original Esperanto books.

Granted, changing Esperanto alphabet involves a compromise. You assume the contradictions and confusion among today's (relatively) few Esperantists for a little while, and you enhance the acceptability of the language for the whole world out there ever after.

Presuming that "change is bad", the author of the aforementioned page doesn't take the time to consider the inherent qualities of each proposal. His analysis consists in putting the proposals side by side, remarking that they are all dissimilar, and concluding that

Seeing these contrasting and conflicting suggestions, is it any wonder that a century ago Louis Zamenhof, after he had adopted several reforms while trialling the language, later refused to make any changes recommended after that!

Not at all. Zamenhof himself proposed changes to the language in 1906, and the elimination of the diacritics was included among them. Unfortunately, the changes should be accepted as a block, either all or none, and some of them were quite questionable.

The mainstream Esperantists agreed then to wait until the language was widely accepted and used before inviting an international discussion on reforms and/or simplifications.

"The longer the errors exist, the harder it is to erradicate them." If Esperanto ever comes to be "widely accepted and used", that will just "prove" that no reform was needed, and no reform will ever be. Just imagine the resistance to reforms when Esperanto ever gets to have a billion users...

Underneath

The Esperanto alphabet is reflex of the sounds of the language. That's why some argue that the language should be redesigned with a more accessible phoneme set. Proposals include getting rid of the c and ĥ sounds, merging ĝ/ĵ into one sound, maybe also ĉ/ŝ, etc. Indeed, a deliberately constructed international language could have a lesser phoneme set and, consequently, no need to introduce special letters. But this is another story... :-)

Workarounds Compilation

This is a collection of these and other people's attempts to overcome the trouble caused by Esperanto's special letters.

Last revised 2004-01-19.
Comments, suggestions: send e-mail to Ensjo <emerson.costa@gmail.com>.