by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/09/25 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/09/25/10067692.aspx
When I wrote the So when is Esperanto coming? blog nearly four years ago, I pointed out that Esperanto support, via a keyboard, was unlikely.
People who were interested would really have to create it themselves, if they wanted to see either one.
Every one in a while a new comment would get posted, like From Lance Fallin a year ago:
I actually like using Esperanto to communiocate with others who feel that English is too dominant or difficult to learn, and I am running out of time to study more languages as well. I use Esoperanto to keep myself in practice with any second language possible, and it really is about the easiest there is (aside from maybe Bahasa Indonesia and Swahili?) and as a result, I have no problems typing and seeing what I type in Esperanto ĉ ŝ ĝ ŭ ĥ ĵ but I have a problem seeing them as typed by others in say ... an irc environment #esperanto on freenode for example. It would be nice to have that, even if i have to install czeĉ language or something? dankon, ĝis la revido :)
and Sn yesterday:
I use a US International layout, it allows me to easily produce the Spanish accented characters such as ñáéíóú, it would be so nice if typing ^j ^c ^h would produce the desired Esperanto ĵ ĉ ĥ etc. It probably can be created with the MSKLC, but it would be so much nicer if it comes in default. Wasn't this what an "international" layout supposed to provide?
It may stretch the definition of "International" a bit, but that US International has clear goals, and is used by some locales just the way it is (like Dutch, for example). It does not make much sense as a dumping ground for all letters, incluing ones that Windows does not claim support for Esperanto, the language that uses those letters:
| ĉ | U+0109 | LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CIRCUMFLEX |
| ĝ | U+011d | LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH CIRCUMFLEX |
| ĥ | U+0125 | LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH CIRCUMFLEX |
| ĵ | U+0135 | LATIN SMALL LETTER J WITH CIRCUMFLEX |
| ŝ | U+015d | LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CIRCUMFLEX |
| ŭ | U+016d | LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH BREVE |
is there a language that has them all? I think MSKLC remains the way here.
And that there is little Microsoft can do here in any shipping version of Windows, since that effort to rethink the limitations of the locale model that shove locale usage firmly into buckets modern, specific region based usages still rule the roost. And even MSKLC assumes some locale for each keyboard, a locale representing the keyboard's language....
As long as Windows thinks about things that way, a whole scenario of some specific locales that are not so easily categorized will continue to leave keyboards out in the cold....
Tom Gewecke on 26 Sep 2010 3:44 AM:
I'm not aware of any other language which uses circumflex over consonants like Esperanto does:
John Cowan on 26 Sep 2010 8:51 AM:
If there are other languages that use circumflex accents on consonants, I don't know them. Nobody knows why Zamenhof didn't use haceks instead.
The only consonant other than the Esperanto five that has a precomposed form with circumflex is z, and that appears in the mysterious Latin Extended Additional block, which consists of the accented Latin letters that appeared in DIS 10646 but not in Unicode 1.0, and whose provenance is almost entirely unknown. W with circumflex is also encoded for Welsh, but in Welsh, w is a vowel.
Andrew Sly on 6 Oct 2010 12:20 PM:
One solution for typing in the accented Esperanto letter is the program "Esperanta Klavaro" or "EK". It has been around for over ten years now and is widely used by Esperanto enthusiasts.
http://www.esperanto.mv.ru/Ek/
Personally, I like the text editor Unired, which has an Esperanto input method using "x" that I find easy to use.
--Andrew
Brian Barker on 6 Oct 2010 10:15 PM:
You can easily use http://esperanto.typeit.org/
At least until Microsoft comes to its senses )
Charlie Ruland on 1 Jan 2011 6:29 PM:
Yes, there is a language other than Esperanto that uses the letters ẑ, ĉ and ŝ. It's not a small minority language but ... STANDARD CHINESE when written in its Latin writing system (called Hànyǔ pīnyīn) may have these letters instead if zh, ch and sh in order to save space. That's what it says in the official 汉语拼音方案 "Hànyǔ pīnyīn scheme". (BTW, this rule also applies to the substitution of ng by ŋ.)
Almost all contemporary monolingual dictionaries from P.R. China (and many from Hong Kong) give this "scheme" (or table) as an appendix. Images of it are also reproduced at www.china-language.gov.cn/.../001.htm , and there's an html text version at cn.chiculture.net/.../0603e07.html .
Also cf. the "Letters" section at Wikipedia's en.wikipedia.org/.../Pinyin .
Michael S. Kaplan on 2 Jan 2011 2:39 AM:
I find it *very* interesting that they would standardize on characters not found in any code page, including cp 936. That sounds like a pretty bad decision for the sake of all legacy applicatons....