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A repost from alt.uu.future,alt.education.distance:

From: esz001@cck.coventry.ac.uk (Will Overington)
Subject: Usenet University. Learning Material. Esperanto in 7 bit ASCII.
Message-ID: <lskmb4sr@cck.coventry.ac.uk>
Date: 10 Jul 92 11:49:56 GMT
Organization: Coventry University, Coventry, UK


Learning material.
-------- --------

Quality level: First circulation in alt.uu.future for comment.

Initial Draft: W. J. G. Overington

Additional Input:

Validated by:


This text is being put out in alt.uu.future as an attempt to get
some learning material available.

It is by no means regarded as me giving a lecture.  Indeed you
will find that in places I have said that I do not know or am
unsure, rather than just leave it out.  Hopefully I can learn
more.

Please comment on this text.

----

This is a text on expressing Esperanto text using 7 bit character
systems.

The Esperanto language has 6 accented characters, each of which
needs to appear in both uppercase and lowercase.

The six accents are

c circumflex
g circumflex
h circumflex
j circumflex
s circumflex
u breve

The word circumflex is pronounced "sir-kum-flex".
I am unsure of how to pronounce the word breve, having never
heard anyone say it in speech.  I use "brev-ay", though I can
also imagine that two other possible pronunciations are "brev"
and "breev". There may well be others.

A breve accent is like a miniaturized ) character, rotated though
ninety degrees so that it looks more like a u than an n, then
placed above the accented letter.

Using ordinary 7 bit ASCII codes (ASCII being an acronym for
American Standard Code for Information Interchange) it is not
possible to express Esperanto text directly, as the accented
characters are not included in the character set.

A variety of methods have arisen to seek to overcome, or at least
circumvent to some extent, the problem.

These methods have various advantages and disadvantages.  For
example, some methods are so that a message in Esperanto can be
sent over the net, with no concept of the characters being used
other than for being displayed as they are and looked at by a
person.  Other methods are so that the text can be interpreted by
software so as to produce a correct display on a graphics screen.
That is, a message received over the net is put into a file,
downloaded to a file on, say, a PC, then that file is used by a
program run on the PC.  Some methods are a combination of the
two, in that a file is intended for computer processing, yet is
intelligible to a human reader, even if not in a particularly
convenient way.

In order to demonstrate the various methods, using only 7 bit
ASCII characters, I have devised a sentence which suits my
purpose.  In English the sentence is as follows.

She has bought and will eat nine apples.

In Esperanto, accents omitted, this is

Si acetis kaj mangos nau pomojn.

We need four accents, namely an S circumflex at the start, a c
circumflex in the second word, a g circumflex in the fourth word
and a u breve in the fifth word.

Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, suggested the use of ch gh
hh jh sh u where accented characters were unavailable.  This has
not found great favour and is largely unused.  It can also lead
to anomalies in compound words, though I cannot produce any
examples. [help needed here]

The sentence would become as follows.

Shi achetis kaj manghos nau pomojn.

I wonder whether, for use by computing equipment, but with an
ability to be comprehended by people, even if a little awkwardly,
a capital H could be used, namely cH gH hH jH sH uH, here using
the H with the u, whereas Zamenhof did not use the h with the u.

The sentence would become as follows.

SHi acHetis kaj mangHos nauH pomojn.

Another method, often used in the usenet newsgroup
soc.culture.esperanto is to use a ^ character to denote accents,
usually after the character, but I have occasionally seen it used
before the character, though I will not show that example here as
there have been suggestions, which may or may not be true, that a
^ character immediately before a C character may cause switching
problems, or thought to mean CTRL+C (that is control C) when
viewed by a person not acquainted with Esperanto, and be thought
of as some spurious text.  In this method, which I feel looks
quite pleasant, often the u is left unaccented, though sometimes
a ^ is used and sometimes a ~ character.

The three versions are

S^i ac^etis kaj mang^os nau pomojn.

S^i ac^etis kaj mang^os nau^ pomojn.

S^i ac^etis kaj mang^os nau~ pomojn.

There is a method, of which I do not know the details, which is
an ISO (International Standards Organization) method, which, I
think, uses an escape character sequence.  I am always wary about
having non-printing ASCII characters, such as ESC (that is the
Escape character, character 27) in the middle of words.

The steloj method (pronounced "stel-oy", the Esperanto word for
stars), which I devised, uses three different methods, depending
upon where the accent occurs.  An accented first or second letter
of a sentence is put in lowercase.  An accented first or second
letter of any other word is expressed by an underscore character
instead of a space preceding the word, even if this underscore
character is at the end of the previous line.  Any other accented
character is put in the opposite case to the second letter of the
word.

The sentence becomes as follows.

si_acetis kaj manGis naU pomojn.

This has advantages for computer processing in that the same
number of characters are used as for the original sentence and
each keystroke can be made to produce the correct letter on the
graphics screen as one proceeds, without needing to backtrack and
redisplay an unaccented first attempt as an accented second
attempt.  Also, the text is reasonably intelligible without
needing to be passed through special software.

Another method that I have seen is to use cx gx hx jx sx ux
instead of the accented characters.  The x character is not used
in Esperanto, and the method is said to be of advantage for
computer processing of alphabetic lists such as dictionaries.

The sentence becomes as follows.

Sxi acxetis kaj mangxos naux pomojn.

You will also see other variations, such as a > character used to
preceed accented characters, with a ~ character preceeding a u
character.  A person can usually quickly pick up what is
intended.

The sentence becomes as follows.

>Si a>cetis kaj man>gos na~u pomojn.

I have started to work on a 12 bit character set, capable of
handling all languages written using Roman, Greek or Cyrillic
letters.  Cyrillic letters are used for Russian and a few other
East European languages [details needed] though there needs to be
great care taken as some of these languages use some additional
or different characters to Russian, and care must also be taken
to include Russian texts predating 1918, when there were some
changes to Russian orthography, if those texts are to be
presented in their original form for some purpose.  Bearing in
mind that such a character set will need to be used as best it
can in a 7 bit and 8 bit world, I propose to express each 12 bit
character in files and for transmission on the net as two 7 bit
characters in the range 65 to 126.  This will mean that the
character set will need to have its own characters for RETURN and
so on, expressed as two ordinary ASCII printing characters.  My
intention is to build this character set up unhurriedly with the
intention that words in any language expressed in this character
set will automatically be in correct alphabetical order.  It is
part of my INFORMATION ENGINEERING polyglot work and is entitled
IEp1.



Written as a contribution to Usenet University by
W. J. G. Overington at Coventry University, England.

esz001@uk.ac.coventry.cck

INFORMATION ENGINEERING polyglot.

10th July 1992

Provenance.
The information in this learning material is gained from various
items of the author's experience.