Jim Henry skribis:
> 
> To be fair, he's got a point from a typographical
> POV.  Until a few years ago (when Unicode
> support became widespread) it was a pain to
> use the E-o circumflexed consonants.  

An inconvenience rather than a pain; at least during my lifetime, most 
technologies were capable of handling Esperanto's circumflexed letters. 
The real problem (which existed for individuals, not organizations) was 
that we were unfamiliar with the technologies.

I spent two or three years typing letters in Esperanto and then going 
back over them to fill in the supersigns with pen and ink. Around 1964 
my parents, looking for a college graduation present for me, wondered, 
"can we solve this problem for Donald?" And they solved it -- by going 
down to Sears, Roebuck and buying me a portable typewriter with a dead 
key containing the circumflex and the brev. Strange that I myself never 
thought of this ...

My first computer, like all personal computers of the time, wouldn't put 
a circumflex over the 'c'. Of course, it wouldn't make a 'c' by itself, 
either, only a 'C' (the big letter), as was normal for personal 
computers of the time. (Strangely, though I heard arguments that "you 
should do away with the supersigned letters in Esperanto because 
computers can't handle them", I never heard arguments that "you should 
do away with the small letters in English because computers can't handle 
them".)

Publishing is another question. Even in those halcyon days when I was 
still penning in the supersigns on what I had typed, my friend Ed Baker 
and I published a pseudo-fanzine ("Pli") in Esperanto complete with 
supersigns. How? Easy. You typed the Gestetner master, penned in the 
supersigns, then put it on the roller and started the machine: voila, 
out came the supersigned pages.

Since about 1961-1962 (when Esperanto led me into the labyrinth of other 
planned languages) I've heard the argument that the supersigns make it 
difficult or impossible to publish material in Esperanto. I accepted 
this at face value for many years, but finally started to do something 
that unfortunately I sometimes take a long time to do -- think. What it 
came down to was that I couldn't remember anybody making this argument 
(and they were legion!) ever quoting a specific case in which somebody 
who wanted to publish something in Esperanto had failed to do so because 
of the supersigns. Well, the argument may be made, 99.999% of all the 
publishing houses in the world have never published anything in 
Esperanto; doesn't this prove something? Perhaps. But then again 
99.99999% of all the publishing houses in the world have never published 
anything in Ido, and it would be extremely difficult to blame this on 
Ido's supersigned letters. So perhaps there is some other reason, and 
the presence or absence of supersigns plays little or no role in the matter.

(One other argument: the Fundamento, published in 1905, specifically 
authorizes use of the H-convention, as we may call it, in situations 
where use of the supersigned letters would be difficult or impossible. 
Can anybody point to a book or magazine in Esperanto using the 
H-convention rather than the supersigned letters? I'm sure there must be 
one, but I can't remember ever running across it. So apparently for 
those who wish to publish in Esperanto, using the supersigns is not as 
difficult as even many proponents of Esperanto believe.)

(Trivia question: In what serial publication was the letter 'ĥ' -- or, 
for those whose software won't decode unicode characters, 'h^' -- most 
common? Hint: it wasn't in Esperanto, where 'ĥ' is fairly rare. Answer: 
I don't remember the title, but it was one of that crop of 
English-language magazines that sprang up to support the fans and users 
of the earliest crop of personal computers, in this case specifically 
the early Commodore machines, in the late seventies and early eighties. 
The letter I show above was used fairly regularly in the magazine as an 
abbreviation for "control-h".)

-- 
-- Don HARLOW
    http://donh.best.vwh.net/
    http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/Literaturo/Tarzan/
    http://www.harlows.org/don/