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.
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.
The accompanying texts are transcriptions from this Bible, 1990 printing, alternating verse for verse with the Project Gutenberg transcription of the Authorized Version or King James Bible (bible10a.txt), adapted to a 65-space line.
The Esperanto alphabet has 28 letters. Missing are q, w, x, and y; added are c, g, h, j, and s with circumflex accents (^) and u with a breve (the little curve used to indicate short vowels in some dictionaries). All these letters are seen in upper and lower case. Note that these letters are considered distinct from their unsigned counterparts for alphabetization.
The original transcriptions of the Esperanto Bible were done is WordPerfect 5.1, which includes the Esperanto characters as part of its Multinational Character Set. It is not possible to view the actual Esperanto characters in simple ASCII format unless special screen drivers are used. The particular compromise used in these files is one which has become popular on the Internet. An "x" (not found in the Esperanto alphabet itself) is put after the unsigned counterpart of each Esperanto letter. C-with- circumflex is thus Cx, s-with-circumflex is sx, u-with-breve is ux, etc. In this representation, the Esperanto alphabet is a, b, c, cx, d, e, f, g, gx, h, hx, i, j, jx, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, sx, t, u, ux, v, z. (Capitals: A, B, C, Cx, D, E, F, G, Gx, H, Hx, I, J, Jx, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, Sx, T, U, Ux, V, Z.)
If you prefer another solution, it should be possible to transform the files with some sort of search-and-replace program. Be careful about case sensitivity. In WordPerfect search-and- replace routines, a lowercase target generally leads to replacements for the corresponding uppercase (capital) characters as well, so one must target the uppercase characters first.
Fortunately, only twice do any of these character combinations occur in the English text, both times in Chapter 28 of the Acts of the Apostles: verses 8 ("flux") and 11 ("Pollux").
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, karlpov@access.digex.net,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, Joanna Russ, 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.