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ESPBIBLE.TXT
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1993-05-22
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THE BIBLE IN ESPERANTO
1. About Esperanto
Esperanto is the one consciously created language that has an
actual speaking community, albeit a considerably diasporic one.
It is used, perhaps, by about a million people around the world.
Esperanto came into existence in 1887, when Lazar Zamenhof, an
ophthalmologist in Warsaw, published the first short grammar.
The name Esperanto is derived from his pseudonym, meaning "one
who hopes". Zamenhof hoped that a common language would decrease
the interethnic strife in his own and other nations. In his
lifetime German, Yiddish and Russian were all spoken alongside
Polish in various walks of Polish life, and this linguistic
diversity reflected and exacerbated uneasy interethnic relations.
The grammar of Esperanto is extremely regular. There is, for
instance, one set of endings for all verbs, without exception.
All words are spelled as they are pronounced, and vice versa.
The vocabulary is based on languages which were and are the most
widely learned (as native or foreign languages) throughout the
world, from the Romance and Germanic branches of the Indo-
European family. The vocabulary is particularly easy for users
of French and German to pick up, but it's also familiar to users
of English, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, the
Scandinavian languages, and various others.
2. Translations into Esperanto
From the start, the Esperantists did a great deal of translation
into Esperanto, sensing that this would ensure that Esperanto
became a fully functional language rather than a sort of code.
Zamenhof himself was a polyglot, and among his own translations
were Andersen's fairy tales, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and various
works of Schiller, Heine, Shalom Aleichem, Dickens, Gogol,
Goethe, and Molière.
Finally, he translated the Bible, or that portion known to
Christians as the Old Testament. Himself of Jewish heritage, he
was able to translate from the original Hebrew. Several books of
the Bible first appeared from the French publisher Hachette. The
entire collection appeared in 1926, in a form revised by a Bible
Committee composed of Protestant Christians and published with
that Committee's own translation of the New Testament in one
volume by the British and Foreign Bible Society.
3. Esperanto and WordPerfect
The file found herewith is a simple transcription from this Bible
in WordPerfect 5.1 format. It uses six characters (or twelve,
counting lowercase and capitals separately) peculiar to
Esperanto. These can be viewed in WordPerfect 5.0 or 5.1 on any
EGA or better monitor when the 512-character mode is selected.
To select this mode:
Shft-F1 Setup
2 or d Display
1 or c Colors/Fonts/Attributes
5 512 Characters, 8 Foreground Colors
F7 Exit
A similar procedure is available with WordPerfect 5.0, into which
the texts can also be retrieved. Because of Esperanto's special
characters, which are not part of the basic or extended ASCII
set, the texts are not compatible with WordPerfect 4.2 or earlier
releases, nor can they be routinely converted to ASCII text.
The 512-character mode limits your color selection, but allows
you to see not only Esperanto but a wide range of foreign
characters included in WordPerfect's "multinational" Character
Set 1.
The capital circumflexed C is 100 in this set, so that it can be
selected by Ctrl-v (Compose), 1,100 (Enter). The lowercase
circumflexed c is 101. The others are circumflexed G (122), g
(123), H (126), h (127), J (140), j (141), S (180), and s (181),
and a breved U (188) and u (189).
One who uses Esperanto regularly will want to map these
characters to a keyboard so that the circumflexed letters can be
called up by Ctrl- and Alt-letter combinations. For instance, a
Ctrl-letter combination might be used for capitals and an Alt-
letter combination for lowercase letters. To map characters:
Shft-F1 Setup, 5 or k Keyboard Layout, and then, having chosen an
existing keyboard layout or created a new one (4 or c, Create),
with the cursor on that keyboard, choose 8 or m Map. To map the
lowercase circumflexed c to the combination Alt-c, for instance,
move the cursor under the letter c on the top keyboard section
(the Alt keys), choose 5 or c Compose, and enter 1,101. You may
name this "c kun cirkumflekso". You may wish to compare this
with creating an Alt-c macro for the same purpose; you will find
that mapping the character results in smoother typing.
If you do not have an EGA or VGA monitor, you may want to convert
the WordPerfect characters to a font attribute such as Outline or
Shadow which results in a display of those characters
distinguished by color. If you do this by a search-and-replace
routine, be sure to select the capitals first, since selecting
lowercase first will result in lowercase letters being
substituted for capitals as well.
Note that the documents are formatted for the "Standard Printer"
(STANDARD.PRS). If you wish to print them, be sure to select
your own printer first.
4. Sources on Esperanto
Further information on Esperanto is available from:
Esperanto League for North America, Inc.
P.O. Box 1129
El Cerrito CA 94530
and:
Universala Esperanto-Asocio
Nieuwe Binnenweg 176
NL-3015 BJ Rotterdam
Netherlands
Both these organizations have extensive book services, which can
provide not only the hardcopy of the entire Bible, but hundreds
of other literary works, original and translated, as well as
textbooks, dictionaries, and other publications in and about
Esperanto.
This file was provided by Charles R.L. Power, who has worked
professionally for both organizations, and who has done a bit of
translation of his own into Esperanto with short works of Mark
Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Joel Chandler Harris, Kate Chopin, Robert
Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, John Varley, R.A. Lafferty, and
others. He is married to Daniela Deneva Power, whom he met in
her native Bulgaria, and who has written a popularization of
seismology in Esperanto.