Pointers to information on Esperanto and computers:

Mike Urban ([email protected]) has written a wonderful HyperCard-based system
       to help people learn Esperanto.  It runs on the Macintosh, and
       uses graphics and synthesized speech.  Included are two screen
       fonts and an imagewriter font which support the supersigns.
       Available from ELNA (Esperanto League of North America, Box
       1129, El Cerrito, CA 94530, 415 653-0998).

       Mike also has a copy of an Eliza-like Doctor program in LISP
       which gives psychiatric advice in Esperanto.

I have several things on-line:
       A 3000 word Esperanto-English database with parts of speech
       About 10000 words worth of articles from various magazines
       The first lesson of the Free Postal Course in Esperanto
       A list of the 664 most common morphemes according to a Zagreb study.
       A program which uses the dictionary to divide esperanto words
               into morphemes.  I have versions in both C and Franz Lisp.

Christian Bertin published a good draft in 1985 of a computer
       science dictionary (English->Esperanto) based on the ISO
       standard.  It has over 3800 technical terms as well as
       diagrams.  tel. (99) 62 90 88.
       Rue de Clos Courtel, BP 59. F-35510 Cesson-Sevigne, France.

In the Unix/BITNET/USENET world there are 3 ways of communicating with
       an international audience of esperantists.  Two are mailing lists:
               [email protected] (sign up via [email protected])
               [email protected] (learn more by sending the word
                       "help" to [email protected])
       The third is the USENET newsgroup soc.culture.esperanto.
       Messages are shared between all three sources (when everything
       is working...).

Subscribers to CompuServe can discuss Esperanto in the Special Interest Group
       on languages ("GO FLEFO").  There is also a collection of files
       available for download, including the word list I mentioned above.

How to handle the supersigns:
       Here is where the most controversy rages (and has raged for
       decades).  There are many issues....

       The wave of the future (usable by some now) is to follow the
       international standard ISO-8859-3, the so-called "Latin-3"
       character set.  In this character set, all 8 bits of each byte
       are used.  The first 128 codes are the same as standard ASCII,
       and extra characters are added in the upper 128 codes.  This
       method is preferable because it only takes one byte per letter
       and it is widely accepted.

       The table below shows where the esperanto characters fit into
       ISO Latin-3.  (I've used the convention "cx" for "c with
       circumflex": see below).

               Hex  Oct  Dec Char
               0xc6 0306 198 Cx
               0xe6 0346 230 cx
               0xd8 0330 216 Gx
               0xf8 0370 248 gx
               0xa6 0246 166 Hx
               0xb6 0266 182 hx
               0xac 0254 172 Jx
               0xbc 0274 188 jx
               0xde 0336 222 Sx
               0xfe 0376 254 sx
               0xdd 0335 221 Ux
               0xfd 0375 253 ux

       Mike Urban has put together a font which can be used with
       the X11 Window System to display these characters the way
       they should be seen.  I've also done one for the AT&T 630/730 MTG
       terminals.  As mentioned above, Mike's HyperCard stack includes
       fonts for the Macintosh.

       The ISO standard is preferable for all uses, if your system
       can support it.

"ASCIIzation":
       As time goes on, more and more terminals and programs will
       accept this representation, but for now many people are stuck
       with systems which only know ASCII.  There are numerous
       proposals for representing circumflexed letters in ASCII:  for
       example, ch, cx, ^c, c^, <c.  Zamenhof suggested the "ch"
       method, but in "Lingaj Respondoj" he said alternate methods
       were fine as long as it was clear to the reader.  I've tried
       most of them, but I've come to the conclusion that "cx" is the
       best, for these reasons:

         In many situations it is advantageous that "x" is a normal
         alphabetical letter (for example for esperanto file names or
         esperanto variable names in a programming language.)

         Words are correctly alphabetized when normal programs like
         "sort" are run.

         People frequently want to automatically convert multi-lingual
         text between different coding schemes, e.g. so it can be
         displayed on a terminal which knows about ISO-8859-3, or for
         printing out on a printer which can handle the circumflexes.
         If the "ch" representation is used, the conversion program
         tends to also convert normal English words like "change".
         "cx" is almost never used in other natural languages, so this
         problem is avoided.  A conflict does occasionally occur with
         "ux" (the most common being auxiliary, crux, deluxe, flux,
         juxtapose, luxury).  Most of these can be avoided if the software
         checks for an "a", "e", or "o" before the "ux".

         "ch" actually occurs in some compound esperanto words, so
         again it is ambiguous for both people and programs.

       The same sorts of arguments indicate that u-breve should
       be represented as "ux" (or "Ux" for those rare capital Uxs).

       Most electronic mail systems seem to still only support 7 bits,
       so the ISO characters should be transscribed into the "cx" scheme
       before transmittal.

Text processors and printers:
       If your favorite text processor or printer doesn't support
       ISO-8859-3 yet, you'll have to find other ways to deal with the
       supersigns.  The method usually varies with each system.  If
       anyone has solutions for specific systems, let me know.

       I have some troff macros which generate reasonable output
       for any troff output device.

       Users of LaTeX can find an Esperanto document style under
       `espo.sty' at the "Clarkson archives"; some of the definitions
       therein are useful with Plain TeX as well.

       Having decided to represent these characters in a given way, it
       is still necessary to translate them under certain circumstances.

       Another question arises: when using the ISO standard, what does
       the user type (on a "normal" keyboard) to input the
       characters?  I know less about the status of standards for this
       question, but for example on systems like X11 and the Macintosh,
       to enter "Cx" the user holds down the "meta" key or "apple" key
       and the shift key while typing "c".

Trivia for Unix fans:  The central office of UEA has a Unix system.
       Even more amazing, it is an esperantized Sixth Edition version
       (before the Bourne shell came out): no $PATH, no grave
       accents, etc.  Command names and the error messages and prompts
       of the major commands have been translated into Esperanto.
       Of course this makes it very non-standard and difficult to
       maintain old software or buy new software.  Hopefully someday
       they can swap their PDP-11 for some hot new hardware and an
       internationalized version of Unix like System V Release 4 which
       allows users to customize prompts without modifying the source....

-Neal McBurnett, [email protected] (303) 538-4852
4025 Evans Dr. Boulder CO  Usono, (303) 494-6495
Dated 30 June 1990

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