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 this Project Gutenberg e-text.
A COMPLETE
GRAMMAR OF ESPERANTO
THE INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE
WITH
GRADED EXERCISES FOR READING AND TRANSLATION
TOGETHER WITH FULL VOCABULARIES
BY
IVY KELLERMAN, A.M., Ph.D.
MEMBER OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE AND CHAIRMAN OF EXAMINATIONS
FOR THE ESPERANTO ASSOCIATION OF NORTH AMERICA, MEMBER
OF THE INTERNATIONAL LINGVA KOMITATO