Comparison Between Esperanto and Interlingua - Orthography

Orthography

The orthography of Esperanto is inspired by the Latin alphabets of Slavic languages, and is almost completely phonemic (one sound, one letter). Interlingua, by contrast, uses an orthography established by its Romance, Germanic, and Slavic source languages. Thus, the orthography of Interlingua is much more broad-based than that of Esperanto. The procedure used sometimes favored English and the Romance languages, however, resulting in a little less phonemicity and a little more familiarity to speakers of those languages.

For example, the Esperanto kontakto and the Interlingua contacto mean the same thing and are pronounced the same, but are written differently, because the orthography of Esperanto is simpler: one sound, one letter. Interlingua occasionally departs from this rule, chiefly because the letters "c" and "g" have hard and soft sounds. Such details make Interlingua more difficult to learn and speak for people who are unfamiliar with English and the Romance languages, but at the same time easier to read and understand for speakers of Romance or Romance-influenced languages: the letters show the history of the Romance influence. The difference, however, is minimal.

The use of diacritics in Esperanto historically made it more difficult to type on standard typewriters and older computers; since support for Unicode has become widespread, this is less of an issue, but still may require some setup tweaks for users who don't otherwise use a language with diacritics. Alternately, a widely accepted standard is to signify the letters with diacritics by simply typing the letter "x," which is not part of its alphabet, after the affected letter. On the other hand, Interlingua uses only the basic Latin alphabet, with no diacritics.