From: esz001@cck.coventry.ac.uk (Will Overington)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto
Subject: Expressing Esperanto text on computer systems.
Keywords: esperanto accents, computer systems, PC.
Date: 13 Apr 92 11:18:22 GMT
Followup-To: soc.culture.esperanto
Organization: Coventry Polytechnic, Coventry, UK



13th April 1992

A new method for expressing Esperanto text on computer systems.

W. J. G. Overington

Department of Electrical, Electronic and Systems Engineering,
Coventry Polytechnic,
Priory Street,
Coventry CV1 5FB
England.

I have recently been designing, writing and developing a computer
program which I have called steloj, which is a dual purpose
program written in the Modula 2 programming language.  The word
steloj is the Esperanto word for stars, being the plural of the
word stelo, a star.  The j is pronounced like an English letter
y, so steloj is pronounced stel-oy by a person used to speaking
English.  The two purposes of this program, which runs on a PC,
are as follows.  Firstly, to provide a substrate for some
laboratory exercises using the Modula 2 language.  No prior
knowledge of the Esperanto language is needed.  The laboratory
exercises are about how information can be manipulated for a
specialized purpose, together with techniques for a program to
have an amount of knowledge about a specialized situation.
Secondly, to provide a straightforward system for simple
processing of text written in the Esperanto language.

The Esperanto language has six accented characters, each of which
needs to be available in both uppercase and lowercase forms. The
characters are as follows, though they cannot here be displayed
as this display is in text mode.

C circumflex           G circumflex           H circumflex
J circumflex           S circumflex           U breve
c circumflex           g circumflex           h circumflex
j circumflex           s circumflex           u breve

The steloj system uses a graphics display.

There are various methods in use for expressing Esperanto accents
using ordinary computing equipment.  For example, one sometimes
sees c^ used for c circumflex, that is, two characters used where
one is desired.  This can be quite effective in informal notes.
It would be possible for a program to store text files in such a
format and to automatically convert the two characters to one
character.  Unfortunately, this disrupts the number of characters
in the line of text, thereby making it possibly difficult to
process the files through other software.

This program uses a new system which I have devised especially
for the purpose, at the expense of not being able to use the
underscore character in a piece of text, and with it being
possibly difficult to use the eightieth column for text.

The technique is that an accented Esperanto character is signaled
in one of several ways, depending upon the situation.

I designed the system with the following ideas in mind.

The text should be in a 'one character entered gives one
character on the screen' format.  There must be no characters
that do not display as visible characters if a conventional
editor is used.  There must be no waiting for the character to be
displayed, in the sense that the system must be ready to base its
decision on what to do as soon as the character is entered and
not need either to wait until some later character is entered or
to go back and change its mind over which character to use.

If the accented character is either the first or second letter of
a sentence, the presence of the accent is indicated by entering
the first letter of the sentence as lowercase.  The steloj
software then changes the first letter of the sentence to become
uppercase and accents the first letter that could carry an
Esperanto accent, whether it is the first or second letter of the
word.  This decision is based solely upon whether the letter is
any one of C, c, G, g, H, h, J, j, S, s, U, u.

If the accented character is either the first or second letter of
any word in a sentence other than the first word, the presence of
the accent is indicated by an underscore character immediately
preceding the word, even if there is an end of line between the
underscore character and the word.  In display, the underscore
character is shown as a space.

All other accented letters are indicated by the case of the
letter being the opposite of the case of the second letter of the
word.  The steloj software changes the case to be the same as the
case of the second letter of the word, and accents the character.

For example, suppose that one has the sentence,

Is it snowing?

This is entered as

cu neGas?

The c is changed to uppercase and accented, and the G is changed
to lowercase and accented.

Entering,

cU NEgAS?

produces an all capitals result on the screen, with both the C
and the G carrying circumflex accents.

For example, suppose that one has the sentence,

She sells her books.

si vendas_siajn librojn.

The first letter of the sentence is changed to uppercase and
becomes accented and the s immediately following the underscore
character stays as lowercase but becomes accented.

Thus the text is entered using an ordinary English keyboard,
arrives on the screen letter by letter as the text is entered and
the Esperanto text entered can be easily understood if viewed
without the benefit of the steloj graphic display, if, for
example, using an ordinary editor or scanning through a file.

Copyright (c) 1992 W. J. G. Overington at Coventry Polytechnic.
Published in the usenet newsgroup soc.culture.esperanto.
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