Esperanto Orthography - Other Scripts

Other Scripts

While Esperanto officially uses Latin script, Esperanto alphabets based on other scripts have been devised. None of these are in widespread use.

• The Shavian alphabet, which was designed for English, was modified for use with Esperanto by John Wesley Starling. Though not widely used, at least one booklet has been published with transliterated sample texts. Not all letters are equivalent to their English values, and several ligatures are added for grammatical inflections and for a few grammatical words.

The vowels necessarily differ from English. However, Esperanto a e i o u take the letters for English /æ ɛ ɪ ə ɒ/, with more regard to graphic symmetry than phonetic faithfulness in the cases of o and u. C takes the letter for /θ/, its Castilian value, and ĥ that for /ŋ/, the inverse of the letter for /h/. The most divergent letters are those for m and n, which are /ʊ uː/ in English, but which are graphically better suited to be distinct letters than English Shavian /m n/.