Getting Started With Esperanto: Kiel Komenci Esperanton

Introduction : Enkonduko

Saluton! Esperanto is an international artificial language very easy to learn. It will let you communicate with some people in any country. I am just learning. If you see any mistakes please tell me at . This page is mostly in English because it is aimed at the novice Esperantist trying to get started viewing the wealth of Esperanto material on the web.

Accented Letters : Supersignaj Literoj

Esperanto has six accented letters (c g h j s u) If your browser and fonts are configured for Esperanto, you should see the accents: cghjsu =ĉĝĥĵŝŭû CGHJSU = ĈĜĤĴŜŬÛ

Unfortunately, the designers of the Latin-1 standard fonts did not include them. However, the designers of the ISO (International Standards Organisation) iso-8859-3 character set did.

Without the proper font (Unicode or ISO 8859-3), you can’t display the Esperanto accented letters properly.

There are seven ways to display accents from best to worst:

1. To display Esperanto, all you need as a modern browser, that supports Unicode, the fonts that the web page designer recommends in his style sheet. You also need a Unicode font that displays the Esperanto accented characters. See Esperanto Fonts for a list. Older operating systems such as DOS, W3.1, OS2, W95 and W98 don’t support Unicode.
2. To compose Esperanto HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) for your websites, if you have a UTF-8 capable editor, just type the characters directly. The editor will convert them to the binary code sequenced needed. You must mark your document as using UTF-8 encoding in the header. <meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=UTF-8>
3. To compose Esperanto HTML for your websites, if your editor is only capable of handling 8-bit characters, you will need to type the numeric entity equivalents to get the accented characters: e.g. &#285; for ĝ. You must mark your document as using iso-8859-1 encoding in the header. <meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=iso-8859-1> This is the technique I used to create the web page you are now reading.
4. Use the letter x (which never occurs naturally in Esperanto) just after the letter that should have been accented e.g. cxian. I like this convention best because it is unambiguous, quick to type and displays universally without problems. I think Esperanto should be officially changed to drop the accented letters and use the k convention instead. x then behaves much like the letter h in English to change the sound of the preceding letter.
5. Put a circumflex ^ just after the letter that should have been accented, e.g. c^ian.
6. Put a circumflex ^ just before the letter that should have been accented, e.g. ^cian.
7. Use a trailing h as Zamenhof did. Use some accented letters, whatever happens to be available in your local character set. People, if not computers, will soon figure out what you mean. Unfortunately, this convention is not easily translated mechanically into the accented form.
8. If you have an older computer without Unicode support you are pretty much stuck with this complex approach. Install special Esperanto iso-8859-3 (Esperanto plus Turkish and some European languages) and use them in your style sheets. You also need to install the Turkish Language Pack to make Internet explorer work. Encode your pages as if there were in Turkish:
   <meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=iso-8859-3>
   Encode your accented characters with iso-8859-3 numeric entities such as &#230; for æ

   San Serif SudEuro is a nice sans serif font. BookAntiqua Eo 10 point is a nice serifed font. Lucida Sans Unicode Eo is a nice Unicode san serif font. Tempo Esperanto is a nice Unicode fixed pitch font. Times Roman Eo, Arial Eo, Comic Sans MS Eo, Courier Eo are all Esperanto variants of these familiar fonts. If you use this scheme for your web pages, all your readers will have to install these special Esperanto fonts too.

   If you want to be able to use Esperanto file names and Esperanto names for your program icons, click Control Panel, Display, Appearance and configure fonts for the various places Windows draws text. Brave souls may even use RegEdit to directly edit the registry for this task.

   See browsers for how to set up your default font to be one that displays the Esperanto characters.

   The problem with using iso-8859-3, is when you add the

   <meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=iso-8859-3>
   to the head of your HTML documents, Internet Explorer ignores your style sheets.

Then there are further kludges needed if you want to key Esperanto documents. Most HTML editors are not Esperanto-friendly. You can hold down the ALT key and type in a numeric code using the numeric keypad: ALTdown+1+9+8+ALTup will insert an accented C character.

So I like to use the Unicode entity encodings even though they are a bitch to manually encode. I can edit them with even the most primitive text editor.

Testing Your Browser : Provado De Via Retumilo

To understand just what I typed to get those effects, do a view source of this document. Note that part of the magic is the Esperanto style, in the style sheet mindprod.css which encourages the use of an Esperanto font.

Creating Esperanto HTML Documents : Kreado de Esperantlingvaj HTML-dokumentoj

Web pages written in Esperanto that use the native accents (iso-8859-3) will have the following statement embedded in the HTML header:

Unfortunately, there is a bug in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 and if you do include that metatag, all css, cascading style sheet, formatting fails. You could ask everyone to use the Opera browser, but you are unlikely to persuade many to abandon the Microsoft juggernaut.

For Unicode, the charset would be: Unicode, UnicodeBig, UnicodeBigUnmarked, UnicodeLittle, UnicodeLittleUnmarked or UTF8. See encoding in the Java glossary for more details. You would need a Unicode-capable editor to create such a document. I don’t know of one. Unicode uses a cast of 64 thousand potential characters including Chinese, Tibetan, Thai and, of course, Esperanto. The common letters can be represented in 8 bits, but the rest require 16.

HTML documents may use statements such as this to force specific Esperanto fonts:

<font face=Arial Eo>

You can also use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) style sheet to automatically put Esperanto text into one of the Esperanto fonts, as is done here. They may directly use high ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters for the accents (e.g. æ) or their low ASCII equivalents e.g. (&230;). Using high ASCII is more compact, less work and easier to proofread, but it won’t work in as many browsers as the low ASCII method. Here as a Funduc Search and Replace script you can download. It will convert high ASCII into its &230; form. If it shows on your screen as text rather than downloading, not to worry, just cut and paste it to a file called esperanto.srs.

You can use the script on the raw text before you add any other HTML codes, or after it is complete. You need to download the utility and the script separately. This script does not handle cx, or c^ conventions, but it would be trivial to add them to the script. I did not add them because I am writing about the conventions and I don’t want all of the cx’s converted. Instead, I turn ESPType on an off depending on which I intend, then use the script when I am done just to convert the ones done in high ASCII.

Acquiring Esperanto Fonts : Akirado de Esperantaj Tiparoj

Adobe Type Manager is great for temporarily installing just the fonts you need for a particular task. That way you can rapidly hide or reveal your Esperanto fonts. If you have more than the fonts you need active, there are two drawbacks:

1. Each font takes up RAM (Random Access Memory), so your computer slows down.
2. Unwanted fonts clog your menus making it harder to select the one you want.

If you have a Adobe Type Manager, you can also use PostScript Fonts in Windows or NT. To install the fonts use ADD FONTS in Adobe Type Manager or the Control Panel under Fonts.

Most Esperanto fonts end in the letters Eo or Euro, e.g. Arial Eo or San Serif SudEuro You need different fonts for iMac and Windows (TrueType). Sources of fonts include:

• Most 16-bit fonts now support all the characters you need for Esperanto. You no longer need special Esperanto fonts.
• ELNA provides some fonts. These may tend to be more widespread and hence safe to use in your web pages than others.
• Esperanto.org
• The Belgian Esperanto Society provides fonts for Windows, Mac and even the Amiga. These are the fonts ELNA (Esperanto League for North America) recommends for viewing its pages.
• Sil.org
• Ask AltaVista to search for Esperanto fonts.

The Alphabet : La Alfabeto

There are accented c g h j s u. There is no q, w, x or y in native Esperanto words. Letters are usually pronounced as follows: a, ba, co, cxo, da, e, of, ga gxa, ha, hxo, i, jo, jxa, ko, lo, mo, na, o, po, ra, so, sxo, to, u, uxo, va, za, with q=kuo, x=ikso, w=duobla vo y=ipsilono.

Warning: Accented characters may not display properly if your browser is not configured.

The Sixteen Rules of Esperanto Grammar Dek Ses Reguloj

1. There is no indefinite article; there is only one definite article, la, which is invariable.
2. Nouns (substantives) are formed by adding o to the root. To form the plural, j is added. There are two cases, nominative (subject) and accusative (direct object); the accusative is formed by adding n to the nominative. Equivalents of other cases are formed by the use of prepositions (e.g. de mia patro my father’s).
3. Adjectives are formed by adding a to the root. They agree in case and number with the noun they qualify, forming plural and accusative in the same way. The comparative is formed by the word pli the superlative by plej. Than is rendered by ol.
4. The basic cardinal numerals (e.g. one, two, three), which do not vary for case, are unu, du, tri, kvar, kvin, ses, sep, ok, naux, dek, cent, mil. Tens and hundreds are formed by simple junction of the numerals, e.g. 583 = kvincent okdek tri. Ordinals (e.g. first, second, third) are formed by the addition of a, e.g. 4th = kvara. Multiples (e.g. dozen), fractions (e.g. one half) and collective numerals (e.g. foursome) are formed by the use of the suffixes -obl-, -on-, and -op- respectively. Distributives (e.g. two by two) are expressed with the help of the preposition po. Adverbials add e, e.g. firstly = unue.
5. The personal pronouns are mi, vi, li, sxi, gxi, si, ni, ili, oni (I, you, he, she, it, self, we, they, one). Possessive pronouns are formed by adding a to these. Declension as for nouns.
6. Verbs do not vary for person or number.
7. Adverbs are formed by adding e to the root; comparison as for adjectives.
8. All prepositions govern the nominative.
9. Every word is pronounced as it is spelt.
10. The accent is on the last syllable but one.
11. Compound words are formed by simple junction of roots (the chief word coming at the end). Grammatical endings count for this purpose as separate words [i.e. morphemes.
12. There is no multiple negation: if a clause contains another negative word it needs no ni.
13. To show motion towards, words take the accusative ending.
14. Each preposition has a definite fixed meaning; but if the sense does not indicate which should be used, recourse may be had to the preposition ie, which has no meaning of its own. Alternatively, the accusative without a preposition may be used.
15. The so-called foreign words, which the majority of languages have taken from one source, undergo no change in the International Language beyond conforming to its orthography. Derivatives, however, are preferably formed from one basic root according to the rules of Esperanto.
16. The a of the definite article and the final o of nouns may be dropped and replaced by an apostrophe.

Prefixes : Prefiksoj

Suffixes : Sufiksoj

Correlatives : Korelativoj

Short Words : Vortetoj

Colours : Koloroj

Esperanto Computer Terminology : Komputika Vortareto

Punctuation : Interpunkcioj

Tenses : Verbotempoj

For nouns to describe ongoing actions, you can use the suffix -ad, e.g. amado for loving. The term for sexual lover comes from a slightly different root amoranto. For more precise tenses, consult this table:

Irregularities : Neregulajxoj

• The pronouns don’t follow the -j plural rule. we is ni not mij. Similarly the plural of li is ili.
• There are masculine, feminine and neuter singular pronouns, li, sxi, gxi but they all collapse onto one plural form ili.
• The active present participle is indicated with -ant-, the passive present participle with -at-. Usually -n indicates a direct object, the passive receiver of an action. In participles, the convention is reversed.
• There is a genitive case (possessive) but only for the correlatives, e.g. ties. For nouns and pronouns you use the pronoun de. my aunt’s pen becomes la plumo de mia onklino or you can also concoct adjectives, e.g. la onklina plumo.
• Esperanto is exceedingly clear on the matter of tenses. There are nine possibilities for describing the time of an event. The imperative is used both to command and to suggest that one ought to do something. The conditional is completely vague as to the time of the condition and the consequence. I find it odd on one hand you can’t say a sentence in Esperanto without specifying the precise tense, yet when you speak conditionally, you don’t give any hint as to when.

Esperanto Conference : Esperanta Kongreso

Your first Esperanto conference could be one of the most humiliating and embarrassing events of your life if you don’t prepare. People will assume you are a fluent speaker and will come up to you and start speaking Esperanto sounding like Speedy Gonzales and expect you to return fire. There is no time to think, parse or look words up in a dictionary. You need some pat phrases thoroughly memorised both to hear and to speak during introductions and during the meals.

Esperanto conference 2000-09-30

Esperanto conference 2000-09-30

That’s me third from the right. You might mistakenly think that most attendees would be novices like yourself. Not so. As you might guess from the average age in the photo above, most of the people attending are already fluent and come to gab about every topic under the sun in a motley assortment of Esperanto accents. A conference is Esperanto immersion, not an Esperanto course.

Why Has Esperanto Failed : Malavantagxoj

In a Time Magazine interview, Nicholas Negroponte wrote that by 2004 the developing world will represent more than 50% of the Web. By 2007, the most widely used language on the Internet will be Chinese.

I talked with Chinese and Korean speakers. One pointed out that the Esperanto roots which are primarily from Latin and Slavic languages are meaningless to Asian speakers. The regular pattern helps, but the language is still much more difficult to learn than it is for English speakers. Korean word order puts the verb at the end of a sentence. Esperanto’s flexibility in word order makes the language sound more natural to a Korean. Pronunciation is a major hurdle. Korean has no r sound. The Korean l is like the English l crossed with one quarter r. Koreans have great trouble pronouncing and distinguishing the letters f and p. Esperanto rolled r is difficult even for English speakers and Esperanto makes great use of both f and p. It is quite a bit simpler than most natural languages, but it is still not universally pronounceable.

Esperanto is difficult for Korean and Chinese speakers with its pedantic grammar and fanatical tenses. A successful international language may have to be much more like Chinese than the current attempts, where tenses are handled as needed with adverbs. The international language of the future may well be Mandarin. We may need an interim pidgin Mandarin to get us over the hump until the world becomes fully bilingual.

Here are the reasons I think Esperanto has so far failed to catch on as the language for people of different nations to communicate:

• It is too international. The roots come from all kinds of languages. There are not enough cognates for English speakers. To catch on it must primarily be easy to learn for English speakers. The roots should come primarily from English so that English speakers can read it at sight, even if they can’t speak or write it. Non-English speakers could treat the international language as training wheels, an easy step toward learning standard English. Esperanto could evolve by adding some more English-based roots. Non-English speakers should be able to leverage knowledge of Esperanto to help them learn English and vice versa.
• The accented letters are a PITA (Pain In The Ass). They are hard remember, hard to type, hard to read, hard to print and hard to deal with in computers. My Esperanto spelling mistakes are usually forgetting an accent or adding one that should not be there. Accented letters require high quality typesetting. They just look like smudges on low resolution screen displays. j and j^ look too much alike. Letters should be completely distinct even at a casual glance. See my Proofreader Font Student Project for my thought on why even unaccented alphabets lack sufficient clarity.

  In sorting, accents add the confusion as to how they should be collated: mixed with unaccented, after the corresponding accented letter or after all the unaccented letters. Accents have unnecessarily slowed the acceptance of Esperanto through the mechanical typewriter age. Computers are only just beginning to handle accents with any fluency. They still throw novices for a loop, installing special fonts, keyboard drivers etc. A true international language should not have any accented letters. It should be writable in 7-bit ASCII. If you use Esperanto fonts, MS word for example will show all its paragraph markers as an accented h. Esperanto is a mess with so many different conventions to handle the accents. English-oriented search engines cannot cope with the accents or the multiplicity of accent-kludging schemes. Standardizing on the trailing x convention would fix that. Eventually, as the world moves to Unicode, Esperanto with accents will come out in the wash. However, by then Esperanto will have missed its window of opportunity. The internationalist community communicates via the world wide web and email. Esperanto accents have blocked the easy spread of Esperanto to both those media. Computer companies have not co-operated in the least to provide proper Esperanto support.

• Esperanto was designed to be unambiguous. Unfortunately this goal conflicts somewhat with making it easy to learn. The brilliant clarity and regularity of the tenses and the correlatives make for unambiguous prose. The system of prefixes and suffixes cuts down on the number of root words you must memorise. Though the language is considerably simpler than a natural language it still has many complications I consider unnecessary. Let me enumerate:
  1. The grammar is a little on the prissy side, requiring both -n (nominative/accusative) and -j (singular/plural) agreement in both nouns and adjectives. English gets away with neither. Chinese gets away without even having plural nouns. Requiring agreement is quite unnatural for English speakers, though granted it comes naturally to speakers of Russian, German, Latin, Greek and Korean. Zamenhof did this primarily to allow flexible word order for writing poetry. It also permits word order agnosticism so that people can express themselves in the word order they find most comfortable.
  2. You must memorise the part of speech of every root word in order to be able to use it properly. This is almost as bad as assigning arbitrary genders to every word. Let me give an example. Comb and brush are very closely related in English, but in Esperanto the root for comb is a verb, kombi and the root for brush is a noun, brosso. Look at the lack of parallelism generated from this lunacy:

     the root problem

     kombi = to comb	kombilo = a comb	kombo = a combing
     brosi = to brush	broso = a brush	brosado = a brushing

     And there is yet a third pattern when the root was considered to be an adjective.
  3. In English you can use a many verbs either transitively or intransitively, e.g he boiled the water, or the water boiled. In the interests of precision, all Esperanto verbs are either transitive or intransitive, never both. You can make a transitive verb intransitive with the igx suffix or a intransitive verb transitive with the ig suffix, as if it mattered to anyone but a grammarian. The catch is you must memorise whether each root verb is transitive or intransitive. Zamenhof’s decision appears to be quite arbitrary. You may not just mindlessly tack on an ig suffix on an already transitive root or the igx suffix on an already intransitive root. Tacking ig onto an already transitive root means to cause someone or something to perform the action of the verb, e. g. Mi mangxis la pomon. I ate the apple. Mi mangxigis al mia cxevalo la pomon. I fed the apple to my horse. If you tack igx onto an already intransitive root, it means action that began just at that time. Mi pensis. I thought. Mi pensigxis. I began to think. The need for memorising the transitivity of every verb root is one massive headache with very little payback in added clarity.
  4. Esperanto is even pickier than English about the use of adverbs vs adjectives. English is gradually dropping the adverb. I wonder if the distinction in really all that necessary.
  5. I question the necessity of a special conditional tense. Esperanto dropped the subjunctive. It would even more clear without the conditional because you could more easily specify the time frames in your clauses.
  6. Esperanto has bizarre uses for the accusative case. Instead of simply saying la muso kuris al sub la lito you must say la muso kuris sub la liton, where the accusative indicates the mouse was running toward the underside of the bed, not just running around under the bed. The accusative indicates motion toward, a quite artificial use of this case.
• Dorky dated image, akin to Technocracy. People make jokes about Esperantists. Jokes poke fun of the religious fervor, the extreme optimism and the desire to be different for the sake of being different. Esperanto desperately needs some PR (Public Relations) to make it more mainstream. People will learn Esperanto, no matter what it takes, once I can convince them it will help them to get laid, make money or some other base motive. Altruism does not sell. We need x-rated Esperanto chat rooms. The Talking Dirty section of this essay is aimed in that direction.
• You can’t use it for travel. There is no city or country on earth you can go where nearly everyone speaks Esperanto. If even one tiny country made such a push as a bid to attract Esperanto tourists, it might catch on globally. It might start with a single Club Med type resort.
• Esperanto was designed before the age of computers. For computer voice recognition, it would be better if the ts sound had to be unambiguously either c or ts. Further, the ej sound is not distinct enough from the e sound. It would have been better if e were pronounced as a short e as in 'met' so the two sounds could more easily be distinguished.
• Historically the elite have often seen Esperanto as a threat. Ullrich Lin’s La dangxera lingvo was published in Russia and in Germany. It tells about prohibition of Esperanto, imprisonment, concentration camps, executions and the Gulag Archipelago. Today, fear of being considered eccentric rather than fear of imprisonment puts people off learning Esperanto.

I have already been accused of being a heretic and an Interlinguist in sheep’s clothing. I know almost nothing about Interlingua other than I was able to make sense of a passage of it without any background in the language. It is on my to-do list for future investigation.

I don’t suggest starting over. That would mean another 100 years to get back to the same point. What I suggest is a gradual evolution toward simplifying the language further still.

Another possibility is formally defining Esperanto Comencanta, with relaxed grammatical rules, e.g. optional -n -j, -a and -e considered equivalent etc. Then beginners could blast away unselfconsciously knowing they are not making thousands of glaring errors. They could gradually pick up the fine points, by osmosis, communicating with full language speakers. The intimidation factor — fear of making a fool of yourself in public is underrated as a prime block to the spread of Esperanto. It is one of the main reasons adults have trouble learning new languages. The thought of communicating aurally with another Esperanto speaker terrifies me. I attempted it at the kongresso and was so humiliated, I lost all further interest in the language.

If it is to replace English, ironically it must be seen as a stepping stone to learning English. That would provides the carrot to learn Esperanto. If everyone goes through Esperanto on the way to learning English, many will stick at Esperanto and all will know Esperanto. To make it a true stepping stone, it needs a new set of English based roots.

What would work? It would have to be a simplified, easier-to-pronounce English or Mandarin with a very simple grammar and phonetic spelling. Grammatically it might look a bit like Bahasa Indonesia, an inter-language created by amateurs. You bill it innocuously as a tool to help learn English/Mandarin. But, like NetSpeak, it would insinuate itself into the mainstream. Native English speakers might not be able to speak the language, but they should be able to understand it.

The Competition : Rivaloj

• The existing popular languages in descending order are:

  1. Mandarin
  2. Hindi
  3. Spanish
  4. English

  Note that English is #4, not #1. The Spanish-speaking population of the USA is growing much faster than the English speaking population. It is only a matter of time until the USA is predominantly Spanish-speaking. Spanish has the advantage of being relatively easy to pronounce and a good correlation between pronunciation and spelling.

• Interlingua is another international language competing with Esperanto. It is not as popular, but it is easier for English speakers to read because all its roots come from English, French, Spanish or Italian.
• Trashing Esperanto: an erudite exploration of Esperanto’s weaknesses. Perhaps it is time to have a second crack at designing an even simpler, easier language.

Mandarin

1. There are already 1071 million people who read it, more than any other language. There is a wealth of new material published daily in it.
2. Korean and Japanese speakers are already familiar with much of the written vocabulary, though not the pronunciation.
3. You can display a lot more information in a small amount of display screen space.
4. Though it takes considerable skill and memorisation to learn to type, once you learn, you can type many more words per minute than you can English.
5. The grammar is simple. There are no tenses, no plurals, no genders. Usually prepositions are implied.
6. Much like Esperanto, you can combine simple roots to form more complex ideas.. Even within glyphs there are patterns of strokes that can hint at meaning, e. g. the water radical indicates that word has something to do with water.
7. Numbers (cardinals and ordinals), days of the week and months of the year follow the same numeric pattern, even more regular than Esperanto.
8. The written form has been used to unify the various Asian languages for centuries. It has been field-tested for millennia.
9. There are places in almost every city of the world where you can find people using Mandarin (or the Cantonese dialect) in their daily lives.

1. For English speakers and speakers of other European languages, there are no cognates. You must start from square one.
2. Mandarin uses four tones, pitch inflections unlike anything in English. These are hard for Europeans to master.
3. You must memorise every Mandarin glyph separately and memorise the pronunciation. The language is not phonetic. Every word is a separate pictogram. This is a major memorisation chore for an adult.
4. Because the language is made of pictograms instead of letters, you need a much more complicated system of keyboarding. There are many different schemes in use. All require considerably more memorisation than QWERTY typing. Oddly, one typing scheme for Mandarin would work by having you type the roughly equivalent English word. That could save you quite a bit of memorisation.
5. Mandarin is not a particularly good language for scientific discourse. It is hard to be extremely precise and unambiguous. It is a more poetic language where much common sense is presumed of the listener to fill in the details. Every glyph has many different meanings. You have to decide from context which one is meant.
6. Converting computer programs to use Mandarin is quite a bit more complicated than converting them to use French or Esperanto. You need at least 16-bit characters. This would mean converting huge amounts of C++ software to Java.
7. It comes already attached to one particular culture and world view. Some people consider it dishonourable or unmanly to learn another culture’s language. They should learn yours, as an act of fealty to acknowledge the superiority of your culture.

Esperantised English

English, possibly mostly for military reasons, is enveloping the planet. Perhaps we should employ a strategy of If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em English over the centuries has warped to be unrecognisable. Listen to someone reading Chaucer. English is still evolving. Note how NetSpeak has exploded, particularly among the young. Perhaps English could be gradually reformed by introducing it as a staged fad for young people. You can’t just start speaking Esperanto to the bus driver, but you can simplified English and have some chance of being understood. The reforms would be introduced gradually just by using them in daily life.

1. First we introduce missing pronouns, for third person indefinite gender they and second person plural yous. This is already well underway.
2. Then we get rid of rid of various irregular variants,e.g. ox oxen, The problem is it will sound like baby talk since infants naturally expect the language to be consistent. This will drive parents mad, like those soothers teens affect, which might help encourage more widespread use.
3. Then we introduce some consistency to the tense patterns, perhaps by treating all English verbs as if they were Esperanto roots.
4. Then we use prefixes and suffixes with Esperantean abandon. They don’t have to be in the dictionary in that combo.
5. Then we start replacing the th sound with s, or to something else if that sound is already taken. th is too hard to pronounce for people who learn English later in life.
6. Get rid of tenses entirely, Chinese, Bahasa Indonesia and the African pidgins. When time is important, use an adverb. E.g. I go downtown tomorrow.

People are conservative when it comes to changes to language. Any change sounds horrible. Old English had all kinds of declentions which we dropped much to the dismay of the speakers, but to the benefit of anyone who had to learn English later. Languages evolve to greater simplicy and regularity.

Translation : Traduko

Mi amas æiajn belajn junajn virojn. or La du reøinoj estas en la banujo.

or, if you don’t know how to keyboard the accents:

Mi amas cxiajn belajn junajn virojn. or La du regxinoj estas en la banujo.

Other Translators : Aliaj Tradukiloj

• Lernu.net: Esperanto to and from many languages.
• Esperanto Tradukilo Vortope. I have written a word for word translator in the form of a Java Web Start application that goes in both directions English <=> Esperanto. It works by looking up words in various web dictionaries. You can either run it in a browser or download it.

Books : Libroj

• Book referral for Comprehensive English/Esperanto Dictionary

  	recommend book⇒Comprehensive English/Esperanto Dictionary
  	by	Peter J. Benson	978-0-939785-03-2	paperback
  	publisher	Esperanto League for North America	978-0-939785-02-5	hardcover
  	published	1995-03
  Online bookstores carrying Comprehensive English/Esperanto Dictionary abe books anz abe books.ca abe books.de amazon.ca amazon.de Chapters Indigo amazon.es Chapters Indigo eBooks iberlibro.com abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr Barnes & Noble abe books.it Nook at Barnes & Noble amazon.it Kobo junglee.com Google play abe books.co.uk O’Reilly Safari amazon.co.uk Powells other stores
  Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock. Try looking for it with a bookfinder.

  The Comprehensive English/Esperanto Dictionary is a nice fat dictionary, but it goes only in one direction, from English to Esperanto. It has some sexual terms and computer terminology.

• Book referral for Esperanto Dictionary

  	recommend book⇒Esperanto Dictionary
  	by	John C. Wells	978-0-8442-3764-0	paperback
  	birth	1939-03-11 age:79
  	publisher	Contemporary
  	published	1992-08
  John C. Wells’ classic compact book It contains a concise explanation of Esperanto grammar. Professor Wells has a home page.
  Online bookstores carrying Esperanto Dictionary abe books anz abe books.ca abe books.de amazon.ca amazon.de Chapters Indigo amazon.es Chapters Indigo eBooks iberlibro.com abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr Barnes & Noble abe books.it Nook at Barnes & Noble amazon.it Kobo junglee.com Google play abe books.co.uk O’Reilly Safari amazon.co.uk Powells other stores
  Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock. Try looking for it with a bookfinder.

Online Dictionaries : Retpagxaj Vortaroj

• Reta-vortaro.de
• Technical Dictionary. Available in Unicode, Latin-1 and Latin-3 with or without accents! You can download it or use it online.
• Dictionary of Computer and Mathematical Terminology, in plain ASCII.
• The usual dictionaries won’t give you the sexual vocabulary you will find in the Talking Dirty section of this essay.

Links : Ligoj

• Esperanto.org
• ELNA
• Esperanto Tradukilo Vortope. I have written a crude word for word translator that goes in both directions English ⇔ Esperanto. It works by looking up words in various web dictionaries.
• PMEG (Plena Manlibra de Esperanto Gramatiko) A full handbook of Esperanto grammar.
• John Well’s essay on HTML in Esperanto. This is the John C. Wells, the one who put out the vinyl pronunciation record back in the sixties and compiled the Esperanto Dictionary. Have fun poking around his whole site.
• For a pot pourri of Esperanto information and websites check out the
• International Hospitality Service Using Esperanto.
• Adresaro de Rete Atingeblaj Esperantistoj: Address list of Esperantists, both organisations and individuals, who can be reached online.
• La Flavaj Pagxoj de Esperanto: The Esperanto Yellow Pages
• Virtuala Esperanto-Biblioteko: The Virtual Esperanto Library.
• Yahoo English-Esperanto group
• Esperanto Fonts
• Try some Esperanto Newsgroups:
  • fido7.esperanto
  • alt.talk.esperanto
  • alt.esperanto.amuzo.varia
  • alt.esperanto.komencanto
  • alt.esperanto.konfig
  • alt.esperanto.sci.varia
  • alt.uu.lang.esperanto
  • alt.uu.lang.esperanto.misc
  • soc.culture.esperanto
• Best Links advertised pruned to la crème de la crème. Includes online courses, grammars, dictionaries, newspapers etc.
• You can ask any search engine to look for elsxutu the Esperanto word for download to find Esperanto software.
• EsperScript: a keyboarding scheme for Esperanto with shortcuts for the accented letters and common endings.
• Learn To Count in Esperanto and dozens of other languages. This Java Applet will convert any number into words.
•  Opera is a very fast web browser. The makers are eager to find volunteers to translate it into many languages. This would be a great way to introduce people to Esperanto.
• Esperanto Grammar Checker.

Rings : Ringoj

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