THE BIBLE IN 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 derives 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, which accounted for a great deal of
real animosity among the various groups.

From the start, Zamenhof did a great deal of translation into
Esperanto, sensing that he could thus ensure that his creation
would become a fully functional language rather than a sort of
code.  Among his translations were Andersen's fairy tales,
Shakespeare's Hamlet, and various works of Schiller, Heine,
Shalom Aleichem, Dickens, Gogol, Goethe, and Moliere.  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.

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, although the style "Titolo"
loses centering codes and a hard return at the end.  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, 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.

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