Damsels, Distressed and Not — Faerie Queene, Book 2, Canto 1

Have a good knight

Onward with Sir Guyon, the allegory of Temperance (so it’s rather fitting that my earlier post today dealt with just that). We have a new hero! We may have a new hero, but we get the same old villain, the Archimage, at least at the beginning. And the Archimage is at the very beginning of the canto, getting the first four stanzas all to himself, with Sir Guyon showing up at the end of the fifth:

A goodly knight, all arms in harness meet,
That from his head no place appeared to his feete.

He’s well armored. That gives the Archimage an idea, though how he prepared for this one, the poem doesn’t make clear. Okay, he tells Sir Guyon that he saw a fair maiden attacked by a knight.

When that lewd rybauld, with vyle lust advaunst,
Laid first his filthie hands on virgin cleene.

The Broader Battle of the WCTU

Diana by Augustus
Saint-Gaudens. Thirteen
feet of smut!

If the Women’s Christian Temperance Union got everything they wanted, the United States would be a different place today.[1] A much more repressive place. We have the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to thank for Prohibition (thanks a lot, ladies), but it looks like we got off easy. An article in the September 30, 1894, New York Sun makes it clear that their ambitions went far beyond just alcohol. There doesn’t seem to be anything that they wouldn’t complain about.

It’s a long article, but in the end, I decided to include the whole thing, mainly to get the smug statements of Mrs. Martin. Mrs. Martin seems (by her own statements, at least) to have been quite involved in the late nineteenth century reform movements. The WTCU was active in the suffrage moment, and found that the United States Brewers Association was funding the anti-suffrage side.[0] [0]: As noted in the Wikipedia article on the WCTU.

As the article shows, politics (even the politics of temperance) can make strange bedfellows, particularly when there’s mission creep involved.

A Return to the Faerie Queene

Was this a
temperate
knight?

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged about Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queene. I left off on May 23rd, with the last canto of the first book. So, my intention to blog through the book carried me for just under two weeks. Since then, I’ve kept The Faerie Queene in mind, intending to returning to it.[1] Several things kept me from going back:

1. Travel. They’re tough pieces to write when away from my normal routine, even though all I use is the text itself. I’m done with travel for a bit.
2. Response. In those early days of the blog, the Faerie Queene posts were guaranteed to get fewer readers than anything else. People voted with their clicks, and I wanted to give them what they wanted.[2]
3. Scheduling. For a while, I was writing and publishing, writing and publishing. I’m breaking that cycle. By the end of a day, when I had tried to fill the blog with things people might actually read, I was either done with writing for the day, or had gone on to other things.[3]

After months of “I will return to the Faerie Queene tomorrow,” that day has come. I’m easing myself in gently, since each book starts off with just a few stanzas in prologue.[4]

An Esperanto Socialite in Chicago?

Wealthy. Connected.
Esperantist?

In the early days of Esperanto, the language had a certain level of appeal among the well-to-do. Consuelo Vanderbilt, later the Duchess of Marlborough, was part of this set of prominent New Yorkers, “The 400.”[1] When the Duchess was from her husband (they would eventually divorce) she was reported to be consoling herself with the study of Esperanto.

Although not a New Yorker, the Chicago socialite Bertha Palmer was linked to this exalted level of society, and although her husband had made his money (first in retail, then in real estate) instead of inheriting it, her sister was U.S. Grant’s daughter-in-law. But she did hobnob with European nobility. And she was terribly rich.

But did she know Esperanto?

Natural Law and Women’s Suffrage

Boycott the ballot!

For every change, for every advance, for every new liberty, there are opponents, and in all of these cases, you will find people who would befit from the proposed change opposing it. It also seems that trumpeting the status quo, when you are the one who would benefit from the change, always grants you a louder voice. It’s the more interesting story, after all. And so while the question was being asked in Massachusetts, the Arizona Republican saw fit to tell its readers on September 28, 1895 what a group of Massachusetts women had announced the day before. Note that they’re rejecting municipal suffrage, merely the ability to vote in local elections.

Arizona, at the time the Republican ran this article, was not yet a state (not until 1912), so even for the men of Arizona, anything beyond local elections was moot.

Hyperpolyglots, Language, and Hype

How about a menu?
Can you read one?

I’ve always felt that stories of hyperpolyglots are more hype than polyglot. There have been many such stories over the years, including early Esperanto speaker Winifred Sackville Stoner Jr., and in all of these cases there seems to be a lack of independent documentation. In the case of the younger Winifred Stoner, our source for her talents is the elder Winifred Stoner, who could not be relied upon for accurate information about her own parentage.[1]

So when io9 did an article on Timothy Doner, my skepticism kicked into high gear. The article, which includes a YouTube video of Doner demonstrating his skills, was prompted by a recent interview he did with the Harvard Crimson. He did the video at the age of 16, and it has given him a bit of fame. I’m sure that there are people who speak many languages, simply from extrapolating from my own abilities, still, I meet extreme claims with skepticism.

Sodomy Trial Leads to Acquittal for Accused, Jail for Witness

Don't mess with the courts

There’s tantalizingly little information about the 1899 sodomy trial of one John H. Williams in Montana. The name is common enough that in looking at one newspaper, the Anaconda Standard in that year, I was able to find several men named John Williams, not all of who could be same man: the new father, the dog racer, the retired military man, the (dead) miner, the partier, the con man, the thief, the sodomite. The first two reports on the case, refer to the accused as “John X. Williams,” but in the final story, he’s listed as “John H. Williams.” The “H” is probably correct. Likewise, John Lynch, the alleged witness, could be one of several men (although there are several men of the name in the Anaconda Standard of the time who couldn’t be the witness).

Williams was arrested on June 3, 1899 on the charge of sodomy. He was arraigned on June 5, with a hearing on June 6, leading to a trial on September 13. When the case came to court, he was acquitted, due to a lack of evidence.

Professors Battle over Esperanto and Ido

Me? Create Ido? Be serious!

In 1910, George Macloskie, a professor of biology, made some remarks about Ido to the Washington Herald. More than a month later, Louis Couturat, a professor of mathematics and one of the leading proponents of Ido, responded.

We have the sequel. The earlier part is lost, alas. Louis Couturat wrote a letter to the Washington Herald, which they published on September 26, 1910. In it, he refers to an article that appeared in the August 15th edition. Unfortunately, the scanned copy at the Chronicling America web site is missing three pages. Undoubtably, the interview to which Couturat and Macloskie refer was on one of those pages. (The interview has been found! See the bottom of the post for more details.) The remaining pages have plenty about Esperanto; at the time, the sixth Universala Kongreso was taking place in Washington, D.C. and the D.C. papers gave it a lot of coverage. It would be nice to know what Macloskie said about Ido (beyond attributing its creation to Couturat), but that’s not likely to happen.

Esperanto: the Language of the Air

The future of air travel?

This article appeared in both the Virginia Enterprise and the Iowa State Bystander on September 25, 1908, which means it was probably from the wire services, just a bit of filler.[1] It combines two things that were both something of a novelty in 1908: aviation and Esperanto. It may be the first time anyone had done so.

There is actually a reason for thinking of Esperanto (or any other international language) in connection air travel. There was a recently aviation accident in which the ability of the flight crew to understand the instructions of the tower were in doubt.[2] English, in the 106 years since the Enterprise, Bystander, and Journal ran this article, has become the language of air traffic control, though sometimes its spoken by people whose skills are merely adequate.

The Love Lives of Spirit Mediums

The spirits say that my
husband is a monster!

When we think of “free love,” we tend to think of the 60s, and we’re more–0r-less right, except that we should be thinking of the 1860s, or even before, and was closely tied to a number of nineteenth century social reform movements, including feminism (the concept[1] that marriage is a patriarchal institution designed to oppress women[2] had to start somewhere). In a way, we live in a world that the Free Love moment hoped for, one in which couples who are no longer in love may readily separate.[3]

The spiritualist movement was also strongly tied into the free love movement, according to this article printed in the Memphis Daily Appeal on September 24, 1858, which had previously appeared in the New York Post. It was actually part of a pair of articles, with the second item headed “Another ‘Free Love’ Feast.” The connection between Free Love and spiritualism is only referenced in one paragraph in the middle of the article, but I’ve typed out the whole thing, since I just couldn’t get enough of the lurid details.

Do Not Call Is Not Working

Still getting unwanted sales calls? Well, yeah.

Can we be serious here? The National Do Not Call Registry was established in 2003, and started in 2004. Ten years after, it doesn’t seem to be working. Since I’ve been working at home, I’ve been deluged with calls from businesses. Some of them are scams (they hang up the instant you ask for a return phone number), others seem to be legitimate local businesses.

According to the FTC, they’ve settled 105 in the last ten years. Oh, goody, that’s 10 a year. I think I’ve filed that many complaints this year alone. They’ve collected $118 million in civil penalties, and there has been a further $737 million in what they call “other recovery.” There were a further 34 cases for robocalls, which had $51 million in civil penalties and $198 million in that “other recovery” category.[1]

Journalist Expected Esperanto to End War

Teach your army Esperanto, and
they will be happy with simple uniforms.

Zamenhof’s very dream for Esperanto was that by improving communication between people of different native languages, it could reduce conflict in the world. Zamenhof wasn’t alone in that dream, and many of the people who hoped, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to end war forever believed that an international language would be instrumental in achieving this.

One publication that advocated this idea was the Westminster Reivew, a liberal publication that ran from 1823 to 1914. It was founded by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham,[1] and the people listed on the Wikipedia page about it are a mini Who’s Who of nineteenth and early twentieth century British thought. Unfortunately, A. H. Weller, who is quoted in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser of September 23, 1907 is not one of the illustrious crowd who founded the Westminster Review, but a later, and more obscure individual. I have found little about him,[2] other than that he wrote other pieces on the danger of militarism for the Review.

The Amazing Future of 2008

Amazing predictions of the future! Guaranteed to come true!

Yeah, I admit it, this article would have been a lot better to address six years ago on September 22, 2008, but I wasn’t keeping a blog then. On the other hand, we can just retroject this thing. Pretend that the blog is at this point more than six years old and you’ve stumbled on something I wrote back then. Would it really make it any better. I think a couple of my footnotes aren’t what I would have written six years ago.

The piece I’ve stumbled upon is from the New York Evening World of September 22, 1908. The writer, Helen Vail Wallace, seems to have been a writer of light entertainment pieces; the World has several which are advice to women under the title “Just 1 Minute, Sisters!” each on a different topic (she advises the “fussy and nervous” to take a cool sponge bath daily, and the hasty eater to chew each mouthful thirty times, describing twenty times as “the lowest safe limit”). In her September 22 piece, Ms. Williams is predicting New York of 2008.

Let Volapük Have Its Moment

So enthusiastic about the new one.

A week after announcing the creation of Esperanto, Baltimore, Maryland's Deutsche Correspondent was again reporting on Weltsprachen, world languages. The beginning of the article deals with some Volapük news in Barveria. They don’t go long before repeating, almost word-for-word, the September 14 article on Esperanto.

Can we keep our news reports to one topic please? The article is on Volapük in Bavaria; don’t rain on their parade with news about Esperanto in Warsaw. Also, on September 21, 1887, it's too early to start recycling your earlier article on Esperanto.

Please Don’t Cuss, Esperantists

Let's keep it clean, Zamenhof

While many newspapers ran articles tweaking Esperanto for a lack of “cuss words,” one newspaper, the Hartford Republican of Hartford, Kansas, saw that as a feature, not a bug. As I noted before, it’s not entirely clear when obscene[1] and profane[2] words entered Esperanto. The writer Kálmán Kalocsay in his Sekretaj sonetoj certainly documented a number of obscene terms; I’m not certain if he also coined them. If he did, that would be about 1930. If Kalocsay didn’t coin these words, they might have circulated in conversation and private correspondence. Plena Ilustrita Vortaro does not offer dates for when a word entered Esperanto, and the Akademio de Esperanto only lists words that are official, which many of these terms are not.[3]

It’s certainly clear that Zamenhof had no particular hurry for coining words to translate words found objectionable in the natural languages. Nor has the Akademio de Esperanto has shown any particular hurry to acknowledge these words as official. I plugged a series of off-color words into the search box of the Akademio Vortaro, and found only one, furzi (to fart), which was official, and that only since 2007. I have a 1934 edition of Plena Vortaro de Esperanto, which does include furzi, though it contains none of the other terms I sought (the current edition of PIV certainly has them all).[4]

If You Do the Crime, Don’t Talk in Your Sleep

I've heard you talking in your sleep,

While researching some other things, I came across these two stories, and since they were so similar, I realized they needed to be put together. The first story is from 1906 and the second one from 1911. They both involve people whose crimes were discovered because they talked in their sleep.

People do talk in their sleep, that’s certainly true. However, these stories sound just a little too good to be true. More like a scene of someone talking in his or her sleep in a cheap comedy. You know, the sort of movie where the protagonist falls asleep and mumbles some embarrassing detail in the earshot of the wrong person. It always feels somewhat pat and contrived when it happens in a movie, so how ready are we to believe when someone tells us it happens in real life?

Doing Duolingo

This is Duo. He nags.
(And is © Duolingo)

I’ve been lax on writing about studying Hebrew lately. Partly because I haven’t though of anything interesting to say about it, but mostly because the language at which I’m a good deal more practiced has captured my attention again. Le français est dans mon coeur.

Sorry Hebrew, but French remains my first, if no longer my best foreign language.[1] For foreign languages, it’s certainly my first love.[2] While I haven’t given up on studying Hebrew in Rosetta Stone, I’m brushing up on my French with Duolingo. If I worked for, or owned stock in, Rosetta Stone, Duolingo would worry me. Correction: Duolingo would scare the fuck out of me if I had money in Rosetta Stone.[3]

Hey, Duolingo, Rosetta Stone never nags me! Good job! Duolingo e-mails me and send status messages on my iPad to remind me that I haven’t studied my French that day. Oui, maman, je le ferai. Duolingo does have the advantage of getting me at a much higher level, so the exercises I’m doing in Duolingo are, for the most part, refresher. I started studying French at twelve and have kept on with it, more or less, over the last forty years.[4] I’ve studied some Hebrew, but forget saying anything complex in it.[5]

Sister Hildegard’s Language

Saint Hildegard says not to write
anything nasty with her letters.

Happy St. Hildegard’s Day!

Today is the feast day of St. Hildegard of Bingen, who is probably the only saint to have created a language. She did other things to, but among those who study constructed languages, her “Lingua Ignota” has long held pride of place as the earliest recorded artificial language. She died on September 17, 1179. I’m not certain if that’s been adjusted for calendar changes, but about 853 years ago today.[1]

Our Boys in France, Speaking Esperanto

Esperanto gets called a threat.
Again.

I wasn’t sure where to put this one, since what follows is abstracted from a series of letters to the editor. The first letter was sent by James McKirdy to two newspapers. The New-York Tribune ran it on August 31, 1917 and the Sun on September 2. Joseph Silbernik wrote an expansion on Mr. McKirdy’s letter, which appeared in the Tribune on September 6, while the Sun published a rebuttal on that same day. Mr. Silbernik responded to the rebuttal in the Sun on September 17, and then again on the 25th. (I could have put it on any of those dates.)

The Sun was not promoting Esperanto, to put it mildly. While the Tribune titled Mr. McKirdy’s letter merely “Esperanto for Soldiers,” the Sun after headlining the letter “Protect Our Soldiers!” made it clear from the subhead from what they needed to be protected: “Awful Threat to Impose the Study of Esperanto on Them.” Ouch. Likewise, the rebuttal was titled “The Question of Teaching Our Soldiers in France No Man’s Tongue,”[1] and the rebuttal was “Esperanto in France: Blithe Enumeration of Some of Its Eminent Victims.”

Esperanto and Reverse Colonization

A vision of the future!

One of the anxieties of the late twentieth century was “reverse colonization.” There is a classic paper on this subject called “The Occidental Tourist,” which looks at themes of reverse colonization in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Count Dracula’s aim is not only to munch on the dainty dainty neck of Lucy Westerna,[1] but to gain dominion over the West. The count is, after all an Eastern European nobleman.

It wasn’t Dracula alone. Several years ago, I took a class called “Turns of the Century” which looked at, in part, how during the (approximately) twenty years with 1900 at their middle, certain themes predominated and paramount among these fears was that of “reverse colonization”: the fear that the once dominated would become the dominant.

Damn You, Esperanto!

Curses!

More about Esperanto and cussing. In the early press items on Esperanto, there was this steady beat of criticism (less often, praise) that Esperanto lacked cuss words. In 1911, on their way to the Universala Kongreso, a group of Esperantists sought to set the record straight, although it does seem that there really weren't cuss words in Esperanto in 1911.

The following was reported in the Times Dispatch of Richmond, Virginia on September 15, 1911, as having occurred in New York. I have no idea why it isn’t in a New York paper. Maybe it was. Newspapers of the era would frequently reprint things from other papers, after all.

Esperanto First Appears in the US Press

The first!

I’m always reluctant to cite an article from Der Deutsche Correspondent, the German-langauge newspaper published in Baltimore, Maryland from 1848 until 1918. My German is weak and and I find fraktur[1] difficult to read. But how could I resist the first article to appear in the United States about Esperanto?

It took quite a while for knowledge of Esperanto to filter out of Poland. Dr. Zamenhof could have found a more neglected place than Warsaw from which to publish his pamphlet, but it would have required some work. The slow growth was helpful for Esperanto, compared to the rapid rise and fall of Volapük, which by the time anyone had heard of Esperanto, was already going through its period of reformist schisms. Unlike Esperanto during the Ido conflict, Volapük didn’t fare all that well after the schisms.

Tramp Stamps

Not that kind.
This kind.

And we get a comic strip today at The Imp of the Diverse. I love a good comic strip (the survival of the bad ones always amazes me[1]). This strip from the El Paso Herald on September 13, 1910 is from one of the great classics of the comic strip, Mutt and Jeff. When I read it as a child, I had no idea that it had been created before my grandparents were born. According to Wikipedia, the strip started (as A. Mutt) in 1907, with Jeff appearing in 1908. I’ve glanced at some of the other Mutt and Jeff strips from the period, and I’m still not quite sure why they’re being tracked. Or why the inspector is a dog. The obvious answer is “because.”

Though Inspector Stew may be skilled at tracking, it’s unclear why he’s tracking Mutt and Jeff. They do, however, seem to be tramps, engaging in schemes to get money and not above a little petty thievery (the September 7 strip seems to imply that they’re going to steal eggs), although Stew is tracking them before that. I did find the strip that shows that Inspector Stew is eventually successful.

But what does this have to do with Esperanto?[2]

A Charming Flirt

Are you just going to flirt,
or do you plan to get serious?

William Alexander’s Flirting with French is a charming book, though perhaps in the spirit of things, one should say, “ce livre, il a beaucoup de charme”[1] In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that while my flirting has not been as hardcore as Mr. Alexander’s, it seems to be of more faithful duration.

Like Mr. Alexander, I am a man in his 50s (I’m a little younger), I have worked in IT, and I took French in high school. Unlike Mr. Alexander, I didn’t struggle with French then or at any subsequent point.[2] Although my French is sufficiently unpracticed to fall shy of where I’d like it to be (a subject I’ll return to later),[3] my command of French is beyond that which Mr. Alexander claims in his book. Did I mention that the book is charming?

There are two narratives operating in this book. One clearly deserves the title Flirting with French. In it a middle-aged man embarks on a year-long quest to conquer the French language. Honestly, whether he learns a word of French or not is irrelevant: we’re there for the journey, not the destination. The parallel text might be called Dancing with Disaster, as Mr. Alexander wrote this while being treated for a serious heart condition, nevertheless doing things that took him far from his cardiologist. In one section of the book, he’s off for an intensive study course in Provence while under treatment for a potentially fatal problem. I think that would leave me too frightened to cope with irregular verbs.

Zamenhof Found!

Was he ever in trouble?

This was a news story that crops out of nowhere. It something that was only reported on once it was over, but some news articles note that Dr. Zamenhof “had been missing for several months.” Edmond Privat in his Life of Zamenhof makes no mention of the Zamenhof’s being missing at all. However, it does seem that the Esperantists in Washington, D.C. were concerned and were able to get the State Department to look into it.

The Washington Herald noted that Dr. Zamenhof was living with his family in Poland, which didn’t actually exist as a country in 1915. Warsaw was part of Germany, while Bialystok (another town that Zamenhof lived in) was in Russa, as was Hrodna, where his family lived for some time. Bialystok is now within Poland’s borders and Hrodna is in Belarus.

Admittedly, when all this happened, Europe was in the midst of World War I. This was a war zone.

The Danger of Esperanto

Protecting French children from
the dangers of Esperanto

In July 1922, Léon Bérard, the French Minister of Education, banned the teaching of Esperanto in French universities. The French were not done with Esperanto. One it was banned in the universities, the French went on to ban it in public schools as well. They said they had their reasons.

On September 10, 1922, the New-York Tribune ran a translation of an piece by the editor in chief of Le Matin, Stephane Lauzanne. Mr. Lauzanne spent half his editorial writing about Esperanto. The piece is listed as appearing in Le Matin on August 25. I haven't looked it up there.

Crushed By Troubles, Duchess Studies Esperanto

What language would she be
studying if she were happy?

I’m sorry, but was the Esperanto part supposed to make us feel more sorry for Consuelo Spencer-Churchill? The Esperanto reference appears in the third subhead in an article in September 9, 1907 San Francisco Call. In the headline and subheads we learn that the “American duchess” is “crushed by troubles,” “forlorn,” has given up society, and that she’s “reading and learning Esperanto.” Oh, the horror of it all.

The duchess in question was, at the time, Duchess of Marlborough. Her maiden name was Consuelo Vanderbilt; she was an American heiress who married into the British nobility (just like Downton Abbey!). Unlike the Crawleys (specifically the Earl of Grantham and his American-born wife), history (and Wikipedia, yeah) records that the Spencer-Churchills did not have a happy marriage (though this scandal would have died down before the Titanic sunk with Lady Mary’s marriage prospects)[1]

Esperanto Magazine Launched

Not bad.
Ran for about 60 years

L’Amerika Esperantisto seems to have launched with a good deal of fanfare. Not bad for a publication in Esperanto. I have found at least nine papers announcing that there would be, for the first time, an Esperanto magazine in the the United States.

Five newspapers carried the same piece (more or less). What follows is my creation, as the various pieces are dated the 8th, the 10th, or not all all, and more newspapers got the name of the publication wrong than got it right.

Oklahoma City, Sept. 8—L’Amerika Esperantisto, the first Esperanto journal ever published in America has commenced publication here. Over 40 such journals are published in Europe, where the late Geneva conference created widespread interest in the subject.

Three newspapers (Gainsville Daily Sun, Minneapolis Journal, and the Hopkinsville Kentuckian) misname the magazine as L’Amerika Esperantesto, with the Daily Sun writing “esperanto” all in lower case, only the Hays Kansas Free Press got all the words right.

Esperanto — A Nest of Spies?

So much for holding the UK in Moscow

Such was the contention of the Russian government in 1911 after convicting the president (and founder) of the Russian Esperanto League[1] of treason. An article appeared in various papers[2] in early September 1911 of the September 8 trial. It was clearly big news out of Russia.

Other reading I’ve done has made it clear that the Russian government was suspicious of Esperanto from the start. There were reports that the Czarist censors were learning Esperanto, and at other times that sending Esperanto materials into Russia was forbidden. It’s one of the oft-told Esperanto tales that Marcus Zamenhof, Ludovik’s father, worried what the official response to his son’s language would be, and if it would have an effect on Marcus’s job as a censor.

Esperanto Blamed for Death of Volapük

Didn't the Volapük speakers
have a hand in all this?

There’s general belief is that the failure of Volapük was caused by the rise of Esperanto, even though the dates don’t really match up. Yes, Esperanto was created seven years after Volapük, but when the last Volapük congress occurred in 1889, the movement was already full of strife. Admittedly, the defection of the Nuremberg Volapük Society (which became the Nuremberg Esperanto Society) probably hurt. Still, with the first Esperanto congress sixteen years away, the Nurembergers were taking a chance.[1]

When the corpse of Volapük[2] is examined, everyone always wants to know what Esperanto had to do with it. We were nowhere near it! Yet a piece that appeared in the Marshalltown, Iowa Evening Times-Republican, on September 7, 1911, asserted that Esperanto was responsible for the failure of Volapük.[3]

Why Volapük Failed

It hasn't failed until everyone gives up!

The post-mortem for Volapük was delivered in the pages of the Evening Times[1] of Washington, D.C. on September 6, 1902, by none other than a man described as the “Chief Volpukian in the United States.“ By that time, there wen’t all that many Volapük speakers to be chief of, but that was the lot of Charles E. Sprague, the author of the Hand-Book of Volapuk.

Wikipedia has a interesting fact on Mr. Sprague that puts me literally one handshake away. At the 1986 World Science Fiction Convention in Atlanta, George, I got to meet the great science fiction writer, L. Sprague de Camp. I just happened to be at hand for the question, “excuse me, young man, do you know where the elevators are?”[2] Mr. Sprague was Mr. de Camp’s maternal grandfather.

Esperanto in 1908 Paris

"The two-thousand-and-first language"
in their view, one too many.

A cautionary tale published in the New York Sun on September 5, 1908 shows the problem of network effects. There might have been a lot of Esperanto speakers in France at that time, but the point of the Sun piece (translated from Le Matin) was that your Esperanto wasn’t going to do you any help in Paris.

Other reading I’ve done has shown that Le Matin was fairly hostile to the Esperanto movement, in part perhaps to the appeal Esperanto had for the labor movement in Europe. The conservative newspaper does not seem to have been a fan of organized labor in any language, although the motive behind the Le Matin piece was the fear that Esperanto would reduce the prestige of French. If you want to be a truly sophisticated world traveller, you should speak French. Ask any Frenchman.

Why the Louisiana Marriage Ruling Doesn’t Bother Me (Much)

Our love is bigger than Louisiana

The winning streak is over. I’ve lost count of how many district court wins there have been for marriage equality since the Windsor decision last June. Let’s just call it a bunch. That bunch of cases includes each of the appeals districts, and in many of those districts, there have been further rulings (including one today) that have called for overturning bans on same-sex marriage.

Judge Martin Feldman is aware that he is running contrary to the stream of opinions, and he certainly is entitled to believe that he is right and all those other judges are wrong. On the other hand, I’ve read the opinion, and this is not one for the ages. Paige Lavender (is that her real name?) writing at Huffington Post offers what she calls The 6 Most F*&%ed Up Parts Of The Louisiana Gay Marriage Ruling.

More Esperanto Theater

Too late to get tickets, of course.

Ivy Kellerman Reed’s translation of As You Like It (Kiel Plaĉas al Vi) was the first, but not the last time a play in Esperanto was presented in the Washington, D. C. area. While I cannot say this with any great authority, it seems that most (if not all) Universalaj Kongresoj include theatrical performances (among other matters), it’s probably a rarity for a play in Esperanto to be produced outside a Kongreso, although there are some records of plays produced by local Esperanto groups.

The Washington Times reported on September 4, 1912 that a group of high school students from the Washington High School Esperanto Club would be mounting a production of a play titled Ĝis La Revido[1] in Annapolis, Maryland. There is no subsequent review of this play, so we do not know how the students acquitted themselves.

Your Knees, Please

We have reached cruising
altitude. You may now irritate
those passengers closest to you.

There have been a lot of recent news reports on conflicts over the use of the Knee Defender during flights.[1] We’re now up to three incidents where planes were diverted because someone was using a Knee Defender. I certainly understand some of the objections that people have raised about flying, although not all of them apply to me.

I do realize that for very tall people there simply is insufficient space between seats in economy. I actually don’t agree with those people who say “pay for more leg room, then,” especially as I’ve occasionally gone for the seat with more leg room, and I’m not tall. Actually, at 5’4”, even I find those seats a little cramped. I also sympathize with those who have had problems with computers because the person in front of them has suddenly reclined. Yeah, my computer is too big to fit behind a reclined seat, so that rules out working in iPhoto when I’m on a flight.[2]

The Death of Diplomatic Discourse

And what if an American President
started giving nicknames
to world leaders?

And Esperanto was to blame.

The Washington Times reported on September 3, 1922 that the French were concerned that American slang might become the future language of diplomacy, supplanting French. Of course, it did happen that English became the international language of diplomacy, but really not because of Esperanto. I’m also going to hazard a guess that diplomats are probably still speaking in a formal register, mostly to minimize potential misunderstanding.

The French saw two horrible potential futures, and in both of them the prestige of French had been minimized. If not English, then Esperanto (perhaps worse!). This was part of a wide pattern of opposition to Esperanto by the French in the 1920s. While this article is largely about the efforts of French educators against Esperanto, the French also blocked a proposal at the League of Nations to use Esperanto as the official language of that body, once again, for fears that French would lose its prestige status.

Doctor Praises Esperanto Congress

H.W. Yemans, another
doctor in the Esperanto
movement

During the build-up to the 1910 Universala Kongreso, its organizers kept saying that it was going to be the largest ever, although when it actually occurred, it was the smallest yet, and the only smaller was a hastily planned congress at a great remove from most Esperanto speakers and held during a war.[1] The high hopes that the Esperanto movement had for the 1910 congress did not bear fruit. Yet in the aftermath, Dr. H. W. Yemans it touting that it was the largest ever held in the United States. Well, there’s that.

The Esperanto movement was probably at its height in the United States during this period, and yet it wasn’t enough. Though the piece was titled “Says Esperanto Is Coming Talk” (“an up-and-coming language”), its day hasn’t arrived yet. In 1910, there were more than 2,300 subscribers to Amerika Esperantisto. The 2013 membership directory of Esperanto-USA has about 500 members in it.[2] On the other hand, a Facebook search for “Esperanto members who live in the United States” returns “more than 1,000 people.”[3] Esperanto might be doing well in the United States, but it’s hard to tell. It, alas, was never the “coming talk” that the Yale Expositor said it was on September 2, 1910.

A Change of Plans for 1915

That's a no on the congress,
and that's our final word.

One thing that I find fun in reading old newspapers is that often there are plans and predictions that run contrary to what actually happened. The 1915 Universala Kongreso was held in San Francisco. It holds the dubious distinction of being the smallest UK ever, with a mere 163 participants. Apparently, it wasn’t initially the plan of the Esperanto Central Office to hold the convention in San Francisco.

In 1910, representatives of San Francisco (Sinclair Lewis) and New Orleans (the less well-known Grosvenor Dawes) petitioned the Esperanto Congress in Washington, D.C. to hold the conference there in 1915. Both cities were vying for the Worlds Fair (San Francisco got it), and both felt that the support of the Esperanto movement would help them.