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 MoliŠre. 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.