Sherlockian.Net: Esperanto

by Darold Booton, Jr. (booton@esperanto.nu), for Sherlockian.Net

Perhaps fewer know that in the same year Dr. Ludvick Lazar Zamenhof, a polish oculist, introduced into the world a project that he had developed since his teenage years, the international language, Esperanto. Before Zamenhof other proposals for a universal language had been made, and thousands have been made since his, but Esperanto stands as the most widely accepted with its two million speakers in over one hundred countries, its large body of original and translated literature, including the Bible, Shakespeare, and, for the readers of this website, the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

About Esperanto

The Esperanto alphabet has 28 letters:

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

When the technological precursor to the internet was developed, the developers apparently did not think that anyone except English speakers would use it and so little accommodation was made for the markings of other languages. With the introduction of the extended ASCII character set it became possible, though sometimes not easy, to represent other languages. In the internet English is represented by the “iso-8859-1” character set; other Latin-based languages by some other “iso-8859-x” character set. Esperanto may be represented by “iso-8859-3” character set, or as it is sometimes called “Latin-3”. Another standard for representation of international characters is Unicode, which can represent thousands of different characters.

Esperantists usually use Latin-3, Unicode, or the “x-method” to present their pages in the internet.

To view Latin-3 a user must download a set of Latin-3 fonts, install them in Windows, and using the “preferences” in the browser, set it to use these Latin-3 fonts.

To use Unicode, the user need only have Windows 98 or the later version of Windows 95 and a current browser (current version of Mozilla, Netscape, or Internet Explorer). Read more about Latin 3, Unicode, and Esperanto here.

The x-method simply represents the special Esperanto characters as ĉ = cx, ĝ = gx, ĥ = hx, ĵ = jx, ŝ = sx, ŭ= ux. And the user need do nothing special to read the text. This method works even with a text-based browser.

Sherlock Holmes in Esperanto