Produced by David Starner, William Patterson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

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TRANSCRIBER’S note: 

The Esperanto alphabet contains 28 characters.  These are the characters of English, but with “q”, “w”, “x”, and “y” removed, and six diacritical letters added.  The diacritical letters are “c”, “g”, “h”, “j” and “s” with circumflexes (or “hats”, as Esperantists fondly call them), and “u” with a breve.  Zamenhof himself suggested that where the diacritical letters caused difficulty, one could instead use “ch”, “gh”, “hh”, “jh”, “sh” and “u”.  A plain ASCII file is one such place; there are no ASCII codes for Esperanto’s special letters.

However, there are two problems with Zamenhof’s “h-method”.  There is no difference between “u” and “u” with a breve, and there is no way to determine (without prior knowledge of the word(s) involved, and sometimes a bit of context) whether an “h” following one of those other five letters is really the second half of a diacritical pair, or just an “h” that happened to find itself next to one of them.  Consequently other, unambiguous, methods have been used over the years.  One is the “x-method”, which uses the digraphs “cx”, “gx”, “hx”, “jx”, “sx” and “ux” to represent the special letters.  There is no ambiguity because the letter “x” is not an Esperanto letter, and each diacritical letter has a unique transliteration.  This is the method used in the ASCII versions of this Project Gutenberg e-text.

However, in the discussion of the name “Washington”, “W” and “sh” were indeed used in the original document.  “Esparanto” and “flexbility” were also found in the original document and retained, along with a “than” where a “then” was probably intended.

In addition, the 7-bit ASCII version of this book uses the German “-e” convention to represent characters with umlauts.  The 8-bit ASCII version uses the ISO-8859-1 character set to represent these German and Volapuek characters.  The HTML version uses Unicode and therefore displays properly all the characters for the languages... including Esperanto!

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Esperanto
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Hearings
before the
committee on education

Houseof representatives
sixty-third congress
second session

On

H. Res. 415
A resolution providing for the study of Esperanto
as an auxiliary language

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Statementsof

Hon.  Richard Bartholdt
A representative from the state of Missouri