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The alphabet is phonetic in that each letter has a consistent sound. There is however debate on whether the mapping from phonemes to letters is unique, because one could consider certain letters as combinations of phonemes (c = ts; c = ts; g = dj). Many speakers however pronounce these letters slightly different from the mentioned combinations. It is plausible that such differences are phonemic, just as in Polish there is a phonemic distinction between "trz" and "cz", but if so, it is a very subtle distinction to many speakers (not even being apparent in the SAMPA representation), and runs contrary to the principle of easily distinguishable phonemes. But if such differences are not phonemic, then the mapping is indeed non-unique, and separate letters are not justified.

In handwritten Esperanto, the accented letters cause no problems. However, since none of them appear on standard alphanumeric keyboards, various different methods have been devised for representing them in printed and typed text using more standard characters. The original method was what is now referred to as the "h-system", but this has now largely been superseded by the so-called "x-system". With the advent of Unicode, the need for such systems is lessening.

1 The h-system

The original method of representing accented letters is due to the initiator of Esperanto, L. L. ZamenhofLudovic Lazarus (Ludwik Lejzer) Zamenhof ( December 15, 1859 April 14, 1917) was a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist, philologist, and the initiator of Esperanto, the most widely spoken planned language to date. His native languages were Russian and Yiddish,, who recommended using u in place of u, and putting an h after a letter to indicate that the letter should have a circumflex. For example, the consonant s is represented as sh, as in the words shi (si, meaning she) and shanco (sanco, meaning chance).

Unfortunately this method suffers from two problems:

1. h is already a consonant in the language, so its use for another purpose would make the pronunciation and sometimes the meaning of words ambiguous.
2. Simplistic ASCIIASCII A merican S tandard C ode for I nformation I nterchange , generally pronounced 'aski', is a character set and a character encoding based on the Roman alphabet as used in modern English and other Western European languages. It is most commonly used b-based rules for sorting English words fail badly for sorting Esperanto ones, because lexicographically words starting with c should follow words starting with c and precede words starting with d. For example cu should be sorted after ci lexicographically, but written in the h-system, chu would be incorrectly sorted before ci.

2 The x-system

The most common system for typing in Esperanto today is the "x-system", which uses x after a letter to indicate that the letter should have an accent. For example, the consonant s is represented as sx, as in the words sxi (si) and sxanco (sanco).

This method solves both of the problems inherent in the h-system:

1. x is not a consonant in the language, so its use introduces no ambiguity into the pronunciation or meaning.
2. Words starting with cx now correctly follow words starting with c. Similarly, other accented letters are sorted after their unaccented friends. The sorting only fails when a word with cz or similar is encountered, but such words are relatively uncommon.

One problem with the x-system is when it is used alongside FrenchFrench le francais la langue francaise is one of the most important Romance languages, outnumbered only by Spanish and Portuguese. French is the 11th most spoken language in the world, spoken by about 77 million people (called Francophones) as a mother to text, because many French words end in ux. For example, aux (au in Esperanto) is a word in both languages.