Esperanto Keyboard Layout

By Gaz under Travel

My GTD Someday/Maybe List has been incubating a task to learn a new language for as long as I’ve had it, and for many years before I’d even heard of Dave Allen and the GTD cult religion movement, I had a vague notion that traveling would be a whole lot more fun if I spoke more than just English.

So Many Missed Opportunities

I used to speak very broken German, but changing schools every year or two as my family moved around killed that off before it went anywhere. I used to be fluent in Afrikaans when I was very small, but not having practiced at all in more than 30 years, I don’t remember a word anymore.

For a few years I harboured a secret plan to emigrate to South India, and even found a Tamilian Kalarippayattu school that was keen to teach Europeans. I figured that I would need to learn Malayalam to survive in rural Tamil Nadu for 6 months of the year, especially as the Gurukkal spoke no English. Unfortunately, I need a better internet connection that rural Tamil Nadu can offer to support myself, so those plans never came to fruition, and I didn’t start to learn Malayalam.

Now that I seem to be spending ever more of my time in the Southern parts of the States, Spanish seems like a useful skill to pick up. Spain itself isn’t very far from England, so I could also put Spanish to use while traveling in Europe. I even downloaded some Spanish Lesson podcasts. But I haven’t listened to any of them in earnest.

Later in the year, I’ll be relocating to Manila, and if I enjoy the experience will likely end up living there for 5 or 6 months a year. I almost bought a Tagalog tutoring program for the Mac at Miami airport, but considering my record of learning new languages, at $150 it seemed like an expensive gamble. So it remained an almost.

Why Esperanto?

This morning, Philip Brewer’s post about Esperanto at Wisebread Blog scrolled through my feed catcher, reminding me of the interesting Learn an Artificial Language hack in Mind Performance Hacks I read just recently.

So, after some reading around I discovered that Esperanto has three main benefits to me:

1. Esperanto is perfectly regular, and very easy to learn. I can apparently reach fluency in about 3 months of study for 1 hour a day. There is bags of study material free online, and I’ve even signed up for free tutoring in Esperanto by email.
2. Studies have shown that students taught Esperanto for 1 year, and then French for just the following year perform better in French than students who were taught only French for the entire 2 years. Even if I don’t get to use Esperanto in real life, it looks like the perfect way to limber up for learning Spanish, Tagalog, Malayalam, or whatever I eventually aspire to…
3. Once I’ve learned the language, I will have access to Passporta Servo: free accomodation from thousands of Esperantists in hundreds of countries around the world.

Typing Esperanto

You might have noticed from some of my recent posts that I’m obsessed with efficient typing, and even though my first lesson in Esperanto carefully avoids mentioning it, there are 28 letters in the Esperanto alphabet; 22 that appear on my keyboard, and 6 more accented characters that don’t:

a b c ĉ d e f g ĝ h ĥ i j ĵ k l m n o p r s ŝ t u ŭ v z

Mac OS X, does come with a ‘US Extended’ keyboard layout that allows typing of the accented characters by composing ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ and ŝ by pressing Option-6 to accent the next character, and composing ŭ by pressing Option-b and then u. As the accented characters are very common in Esperanto, not only would those keyboard gymnastics slow down anyone’s typing tremendously, but I also use the Dvorak layout… and the Dvorak keyboard layout that ships with Mac OS X doesn’t provide the accent composition keystrokes needed to compose these letters anyway.

Dvorak Based Esperanto Keyboard Layout

Google will turn up several Esperanto layouts designed around the QWERTY mapping, but I found only one attempt at a Dvorak based Esperanto keyboard layout which hasn’t been updated in a long time, and is flaky under Mac OS 10.4. Unfortunately, Esperanto has no Q, W, X or Y characters, so even when the layout isn’t flaking, there’s no way to press important combination like Command-Q and Command-W, so I decided to create my own layout that would revert to Dvorak layout with the Command key pressed…

Ukelele is a unicode keyboard layout editor that allows dragging of unicode characters from the OS X Character Palette, and saves an xml file to implement that custom layout. Here is a Mac OS 10.4 unicode keyboard layout, with all of the dead keys from the US Extended mapping preserved (so that Option-6 and friends can be used to compose accented characters), but otherwise identical to the US Dvorak layout, excepting that in the Y, Q, X and W positions are now Esperanto Ĝ, Ĉ, Ŝ and Ĵ (pressing option first reverts to the regular Dvorak key); Option-U and Option-H create Ŭ and Ĥ; and, of course the normal Dvorak keys are sent in combination with the Command modifier.

Download: Dvorak – Esperanto.keylayout

Copy this file to either ~/Library/Keyboard\ Layouts or /Library/Keyboard\ Layouts (not in /System/Library, which could render your system unbootable), and logout of your account and back in again to activate it.

Is There Anybody Out There?

If you fancy broadening your horizons by learning Esperanto (or even if you speak it already) and would like to practice with me via email; or if you have any further tips or help for a budding Esperantist, please speak up in the comments!