Substitutions of the Esperanto alphabet
Substitutions of the Esperanto alphabet are alternative orthographic conventions used to represent the letters of the Esperanto alphabet that contain diacritics when proper diacritic characters are unavailable, using ASCII characters. These substitutions, which originated in the early history of Esperanto due to limitations of typewriters and later computer keyboards, typically replace the accented letters with digraphs or other ASCII-compatible sequences. The two most common systems are the h-system and the x-system, each with different advantages for sorting and unambiguous transliteration. Other graphic work-arounds have also been used in informal contexts.
The diacritics of Esperanto were designed with a French manual typewriter in mind, as French was the international language at the time Esperanto was developed. French typewriters have a dead key for the circumflex that can be used in combination with any other key. However, since the Esperanto letters with diacritics do not appear on standard computer keyboard layouts, various alternative methods have been devised for inputting them or substituting them in type. The original method, suggested by Zamenhof for people who did not have access to a French typewriter, was a set of digraphs in h, now known as the "Zamenhof-system" or [|"h-system"]. With the rise of computer word processing, the so-called [|"x-system"] has become equally popular. With the advent of Unicode and more easily customized computer keyboards, the need for such workarounds has lessened.
ASCII transliteration systems
There are two alternative orthographies in common use, which replace the circumflex letters with either h digraphs or x digraphs. Another system sometimes noted is a "QWXY system"; this is a carry-over from an early Esperanto keyboard app named, with which the Q W X and Y keys were assigned to the letters,,,, and the key sequences TX and DY to the letters and. There are also graphic work-arounds, such as approximating the circumflexes with carets.H-system
The original method of working around the diacritics was developed by the creator of Esperanto himself, L. L. Zamenhof. He recommended using u in place of ŭ, and digraphs with h for the circumflex letters. For example, ŝ is replaced by sh, as in shanco for ŝanco. Where proper orthography has sh, the letters should be separated with an apostrophe or a hyphen, as in ses-hora or flug'haveno.X-system
A more recent system for typing in Esperanto is the "x-system", which uses x instead of h for the digraphs, including ux for ŭ. For example, ŝ is represented by sx, as in sxi for ŝi and sxanco for ŝanco.X-digraphs solve those problems of the h-system:
- x is not a letter in the Esperanto alphabet, so its use introduces no ambiguity.
- The digraphs are now nearly always correctly sorted after their single-letter counterparts; for example, sxanco comes after super, while h-system shanco comes before it. The sorting only fails in the infrequent case of a z in compound or unassimilated words; for example, the compound word reuzi would be sorted after reuxmatismo.
A practical problem of digraph substitution that the x-system does not completely resolve is in the complication of bilingual texts. Ux for ŭ is especially problematic when used alongside French text, because many French words end in aux or eux. Aux, for example, is a word in both languages. Any automatic conversion of the text will alter the French words as well as the Esperanto. A few English words like "auxiliary" and "Euxine" can also suffer from such search-and-replace routines. One common solution, such as the one used in Wikipedia's MediaWiki software, is to use xx to escape the ux to ŭ conversion, e.g. "auxx" produces "aux". A few people have also proposed using "vx" instead of "ux" for ŭ to resolve this problem, but this variant of the system is rarely used.