Judicial Wisdom on the Law of God

I'm sorry, judge, but Mithras disagrees with you.

This one’s a little out of turn. I tend to like to post things in connection with the date they appeared in the paper, and this appeared on April 6, but it seemed so current that I figured why wait until April (when it might not be quite as pertinent).

It’s a little bit of judicial wisdom on the intersection of the civil law and people’s religious beliefs, the sort of thing we’re seeing right now. We’ve got the Latter Day Saints proposing a ban on discrimination against gay people with a loophole so large that anyone could get through it. If people can’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in public accommodation, hiring, or housing, except when their religion tells them they should, gay people are protected from discrimination from anyone who actually wouldn’t discriminate against gay people. Protection from those who would discriminate? Not so much.

What Does a Ketubah Mean to a Catholic?

Not a ketubah, alas.

The New York Times has an article about a lesbian couple in Boston who are surprised that they were turned down by a rabbi when they sought to marry. The couple, Julia Spiegelman and Erina Donnelly seem to be the last people to find out that many rabbis won’t perform interfaith ceremonies.

For those of you who are late to this party, the Reconstructionist movement was the first to call for equal treatment and the full integration of gay people into synagogue life. That mean, even if without a marriage license, celebrating same-sex unions. They were followed in this by the Reform movement and finally the Conservative movement. So, about 90 percent of American Jews belong to movements that permit same-sex weddings.

An Esperantist Italian Count in New Mexico

From his passport
application for the trip
that cost his life

Okay, I’m not positive he was a count. A newspaper article says that he was, though it’s clear that the late twentieth century was the last gasp for spuriously claiming noble heritage. Of these, the Esperanto movement had its share, from the (so-called) Marquis de Beaufront to the not-descended-from-whom-she-claimed Winifred Sackville Stoner.[1] For the record, I am not descended from great French writer.[2]

He was an Italian and an Esperantist. That was easy to document. Luigi Martini Mancini was born in Florence, Italy in July 1871 and emigrated to the United States in about 1890 (this is what he claimed on a 1916 emergency passport application, but on the 1900 Census, he said 1895). At the time that he was named a delegate to the 1907 Universala Kongreso, he would have been thirty-five years old. He had become a United States citizen in 1902.

Poeta Momento — La Ŝipeto

Ne ŝipeto, sed boato.

I’ll start this off in English, even though this might be a moment to do a post completely in Esperanto. There is a wealth of literature in Esperanto; at one point I toyed with the idea of finding poems, essays, and stories and making them more accessible on the web (yeah, you can search through old issues of various magazines, but sometimes that gets a little frustrating). I haven’t done it (in part, because it’s a big task), but I still think about it from time to time.[1]

A simpler idea that I’ve also toyed with would be to have an Esperanto poem once a week or so, much in the manner done (until recently) by Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish.[2] It’s easier, but I’ve still kept putting it off, but here is the first attempt at including a poem on this blog. Not one of mine,[3] but instead one from the January 1896 issue of Lingvo Internacia. Lingvo Internacia was, for a period, the main magazine of the Esperanto movement, a successor to La Esperantisto, but in 1896 its glory days (and eventual decline) are still ahead of it, and it’s the ambitious magazine of the Klubo Esperantista en Upsala (the Upsala Esperantist Club).

The Voice of Zamenhof

Learn Esperanto the modern way!

One of the problems with learning a language by book or correspondence course is that you can’t be exactly certain if you’re pronouncing it correctly. Obviously in our day there are a number of work-arounds for this (that involve using computers instead of books). For languages that died out before the advent of sound recording, an exact idea of how they sounded is lost. The early Esperanto learners had this problem of not being able to turn to a nearby Esperanto speaker and find if they were pronouncing the language properly. A group of enterprising Canadian Esperantists sometime before January 29, 1904 came up with an ingenious solution to this problem. They found a way to ask an expert.

The article in the New-York Tribune reprints an article from the London Daily Chronicle, though no date is given for that. Further, the article does not indicate how the news about the Montreal Esperantists got to London. Did they get it from a Canadian newspaper? Did they get it from the Esperanto press (perhaps the British Esperantist)?

Thousands Interested in Esperanto

Good news for Esperanto

A 1911 article by Frederic J. Haskin gives an estimate for the number of people in the United States interested in Esperanto. I’ve already hinted that it’s big, but it’s bigger than you might think. The years 1906 to 1914 seem to have been the glory days for Esperanto in the United States. When Haskin wrote his article, the 1910 Universala Kongreso was only a few months in the past.

While the Kongreso might have been small (while the organizers said that it might be the biggest ever, it was the smallest up to that time, and only the one held during WWI was smaller), it did spark some additional interest in Esperanto in the United States (which is one of the purposes of the Kongreso). In the months surrounding the event, newspapers had had a steady stream of articles about Esperanto.[1] And, as Haskin points out, there were some positive developments in the United States movement.

Esperanto’s Femme Fatale

La danĝera virino

On January 24, 1910, the Washington Evening Star made reference to an attempt to push Edwin C. Reed from his position as the secretary of the Esperanto Association of North America. There had been no earlier articles in the Star, which brought the crisis in medias res, not telling what the issue at hand was. Two days later, we find out, but not from the Star.

Esperanto was a hot topic in the Washington papers of 1910, perhaps because the Universala Kongreso was coming to the city, or perhaps because that’s where the headquarters of the fledgling EANA were located at the time. Just to give an indication, the site Chronicling America has 236 hits for “Esperanto” in the D.C. newspapers for 1910 (that comprises the Evening Star, National Forum, National Tribune, Washington Herald, and Washington Times). I have to go elsewhere to see what they were saying in the Washington Post. If you were an Esperantist in 1910 Washington, your newspaper choices would be the Herald or the Times, both of which gave fairly extensive coverage of the EANA.

Planet of Giants – Blogging Doctor Who

No such scene occurs

Miniaturization plots—ones in which the characters are greatly reduced in size—never really divert me, since they raise so many questions, but that’s the sort of plot we get in “Planet of Giants.” Beyond the question of how the air interacts with the (presumably) shrunken atoms of our heroes, there’s also the question of the missing mass. If the Doctor, Susan, Barbara, and Ian were shrunk, where did their mass go? And clearly, Ian weighed less than he normally did, since Forester was able to pick up the matchbox with Ian inside and carry it, despite having what would otherwise be this dense object (one inch high, but about 160 pounds in weight) inside it.

The script makes it clear that the characters have lost mass. There are repeated references to how light they are. But, if that’s the case, Ian’s brain is about the size of a mouse, and there probably isn’t room for any real sort of thought (maybe the reduction in brain size accounts for everyone failing to realize that Barbara has touched the poison). There is the other side of the miniaturization plot. Either you’re an inch high and 160 pounds (and thus made of smaller atoms, whatever they might be) or you’re only a few ounces, which means that most of you has simply vanished.

Uncle Joe and Esperanto

Nia amiko, Onklo Joĉjo?

Joseph G. Cannon[1] entered Congress in 1873 and finally left it in 1923. While his congressional serve was not consecutive, he did mange to serve as Speaker of the House from 1903 to 1911, during his uninterrupted span in Congress from 1893 to 1913.[2] Nothing in his biography suggests that he was even the type to go for Esperanto when it was popular in Washington. A autobiography, Uncle Joe Cannon; the story of a pioneer American, compiled by his secretary (i.e.: chief aide) L. White Busbey, makes no reference to Esperanto or even any of the major figures of the Esperanto movement in their roles outside the movement, with one exception.

That one exception was George Harvey, who is mentioned in passing in a chapter on Mark Twain. Twain had written Cannon in 1906 seeking to lobby Congress on a copyright bill on the floor of Congress.[3] During all this, Twain invited Cannon to lunch along with George Harvey. This was before the North American Review took up the cause of Esperanto.

Trouble for Reed in Esperanto-Land

Sinjoro Reed,
grava Esperantisto

While John Barrett may have been the titular head of the Esperanto movement in the United States, his greatest contribution seems to have been that he had Arnold Christen lecture his staff (on a Saturday!) about Esperanto. The actual day-to-day activities of the movement were handled by Edwin C. Reed, whose official position was that of secretary of the Esperanto Association of North America. You couldn’t really expect John Barrett to do these things; after all he was too busy to even learn Esperanto![1]

Judging from an article in the January 24, 1910 Washington Evening Star, there was a moment when Mr. Reed’s position as secretary seemed to be at risk, even though he had been the only person to have held the job, since he had taken the post at the founding of EANA. Prior to the founding of EANA, he had been on the board of the American Esperanto Association, the short-lived predecessor, which was described in Amerika Esperantisto as “not considered adequate or sufficiently democratic in its organization.”

Minister Neither Socialist Nor Sodomite

Very serious

On January 23, 1903, the Daily Ardmoreite, of Ardmore, Oklahoma, reported that Reverend J. K. Smith had been arrested on a charge of sodomy. Reverend Smith was a twenty-eight-year old unmarried Baptist preacher, whose family had moved from Georgia to the Indian Territory (now eastern Oklahoma) some years before. (His brother, Joseph, had been born in Georgia in about 1893, so clearly the family was still there at the time.)

This would seem to be something of a family business, since his father, John A. Smith, was also a minister (in the 1910 Census under “Industry,” the elder Smith’s entry reads “church,” while his son’s reads “Baptist church”). The Daily Ardmoreite described the matter as “a serious charge,” which is putting things mildly.

Can You Name these Legitimate Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage?

Legitimate matching rings.

Over at The Dish, Andrew Sullivan has a post titled “There Are Legitimate Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage,” although the (very short) post is just reference to a Damon Linker piece on the homophobic views of the late political philosopher Leo Strauss. And so I ask: Where are these legitimate arguments?

[A digression (you could skip this part): I’d get a lot more blogging done if I did it in the manner of Andrew Sullivan. Write a couple sentences, quote a couple meaty paragraphs from someone else’s blog. There you go. Quick content. However, when I started this blog, I made a promise to myself that my words would always outnumber anyone else’s.[1] Happily, since I’m only quoting eight words from Sullivan, this is an easy standard today.]

Via Zamenhof-Numero

Ni havas lian numeron

En la fruaj tagoj de la Esperanto movado, Dr. Zamenhof donis numerojn al la fruaj esperantistoj kiuj sendis iliajn nomoj al li. Certe, li esperis ke la numero kreskus al 10,000,000. Bedaŭrinde, ŝajnas ke la numero kreskis nur al la malaltaj miloj antaŭ novaj esperantistoj ne plu recevis numerojn. Certe, mi scivolas kiom da homoj esperantigis antaŭ mi (kaj kiom post mi). Tio estas nesciebla.

La plej granda numero kion mi trovis estas 19,197 kio estas la Esperanto-numero de M. F. Ĉasovitin, kiu estis studento en Varsovio, Pollando. Li esperantigis en 1907 (kaj estas en la 1908a jarlibro). Laŭ Vikipedio, la listo daŭris ĝis 1909, kun la numbro 21,915. Bedaŭrinde, mi ne povas trovi la jarlibrojn por la jaro 1909. Kiom pli da esperantistoj estas antaŭ mi esperantigis en 1981? Ŝajnas al mi ke la tuta listo estus interesa. Tio donus al ni bonan bildon de la frua movado. (Ŝajnas ankaŭ ke la tuta serio estis re-eldonita per Ito Kanzi, “Ludovikito.”)

A Socialist Rebuffs Esperanto

John M. Work
Li proponis Esperanton

The frequency with which I’ve discussed situations in which socialists and anarchists used Esperanto might give a conservative reader[1] pause for thought. Were those under the green star as red as someone like George Alan Connor feared? Yet, for all the socialists in favor of Esperanto and the the Esperantists sympathetic to socialism, not all were convinced.

In 1909, the Socialist Party entertained the notion that the upcoming international socialist congress should be conducted in Esperanto. When the Sun reported on this, they did not name who put forth the suggestion, but a lengthy piece in the Montana News, a Socialist newspaper out of Lewiston, Montana, did. The proposal was put forth by John M. Work, who is described as the National Committee Member of Iowa. Mr. Work was a prominent socialist writer and activist. He does not seem to have had the slightest prominence in the Esperanto movement. The only reference I can find in the Esperanto literature is that his book What’s So and What Isn’t was advertised in the pages of Amerika Esperantisto in 1909.[2]

Esperanto at Harvard

The latest fad in Boston

The Congregationalist and Christian World paid scant attention to Esperanto, even though its place of publication, Boston, was something of a hotbed of early Esperanto activity during the time when it was published, during the early days of the twentieth century. However, when Harvard, which had been founded to train Congregationalist minsters, started an Esperanto group, maybe that’s what it took to get the attention of The Congregationalist. And so, on January 20, 1906, The Congregationalist and Christian World reported on Esperanto at Harvard University.

Harvard’s Esperanto group has an impressive forebear. While Wilhelm Ostwald did not found the Harvard Esperanto Society, as Ostwald visited Harvard the year before the group was founded, he did provide prize money for speeches in Esperanto. A March 21, 1906 article in the Harvard Crimson notes that the prizes will be “an Esperanto dictionary and Esperanto literature to the value of $5.” (Which seems strange because in March 1905, it was noted that the Ostwald prizes were worth $50.[1])

Esperanto and the Advancement of Science

Who are you calling a crank?

Most of the articles I look at do not have bylines, as a result it’s often impossible to tell who wrote the article. The Washington Herald did not include a byline on its January 19, 1922 article on the “present status of international language,” but I was able to identify the writer anyway. The Herald abridged their article from the February 22, 1922 issue of Science (clearly there was no journalism embargo on this piece). The full article was the “Report of the Committee of an International Auxiliary Language Accepted by the Council at Toronto, December 29, 1921,” and the chair of the committee was Samuel W. Stratton.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science spent more than a decade wondering about the issue of an international language. In the 1910s, there were many letters to Science (the AAAS journal) on the inevitability of Esperanto in the sciences. Still, the real proof would have been when the journal was renamed Scienco and started publishing everything in Esperanto. That never happened. I doubt they even accepted a single paper in Esperanto.

Chess, Esperanto, and Evolution

Chess and Esperanto master

I am, at best, an indifferent chess player. Actually, I’m a pretty lousy chess player. There are small children out there who can doubtless beat me as chess, and I’m not talking chess prodigies. A newspaper chess column is not actually going to be my choice of reading material.[1] The word is, however, one of the words that Zamenhof included in his initial list of words, while a word for “poker” (in the sense of the card game) didn’t make the list.

So, if someone wanted to play chess in Esperanto, the vocabulary was there from the beginning, and an article in the Omaha Daily Bee of January 18, 1914 shows that there were some early takers. One of these chess players was Martin Sitera, of Omaha, Nebraska.

Esperanto in Boston

And other places too!

It’s hard to say, as the New York Sun does on January 17, 1906, that Esperanto was having a “revival” in Massachusetts, as that would assume there was some period of great interest preceding it, but all indications are that Esperanto took hold of the interest of the people of the Boston area in early 1905. By early 1906, it was still a new enthusiasm.

The American Esperanto Association had been founded on March 16, 1905 (and so was less than a year old), with the Boston Esperanto Society a couple months older than that. One (imported) major promotor of Esperanto was Professor Wilhelm Ostwald, who gave a series of lectures (on chemistry) at Harvard University in 1904–1905, but the Harvard Esperanto Society seems not to have started until 1906 at which point MIT already had one. Both schools were beat by the Perkins Institution for the Blind. At the beginning of 1906, the Esperantists of Massachusetts were seeking greater highest to scale.

The Reign of Terror — Blogging Doctor Who

They should have
made that his new
outfit

I think it’s a very British thing that in “Reign of Terror” all sympathy, except a small part in episode 5, is directed toward the aristocrats. Oh, those poor, poor French nobles, harassed and dispossessed by the filthy rabble. The early British histories of the French Revolution were written from the perspective that an aristocracy was a Good Thing, mainly because the authors were beneficiaries of just that social order. And so, the revolutionaries get depicted as venal, corrupt, and bloodthirsty, as opposed to those poor nobles who were venal, corrupt, and bloodthirsty.

Historically, we pretty much get a one-sided portrait of era. Late in the story, we find that one of the counterrevolutionaries is himself only of bourgeois birth, as if that mattered. In the period just prior to the Revolution, the well-to-do but not noble were eagerly marrying into the nobility, particularly the impoverished nobility, as in the case of the Marquis de Sade. Sade’s in-laws, the Montreuils, were accused of having monarchist sympathies (which they almost certainly did) in part because they had married into the Sade family. Sade had become a proponent of the Revolution, and was even one of the last prisoners of the Bastille. At Citizen Sade, he defended his in-laws, making the (almost certainly false) claim that his in-laws were staunch believers in a republic, and had only allowed a member of the despised nobility into their family because he shared their views.

The Boy Who Didn’t Come Back from Heaven

Heaven ([bad] artist's representation)
Not actually visible from
seat 37A

Because he never got there in the first place. I should start this will full disclosure: I don’t believe in an afterlife, and certainly there hasn’t been any proof of one, even though people have written books about their (supposed) near-death experiences, including The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven. I saw the item on Raw Story last night, though about writing, tried sketching out an illustration of the Pearly Gates (hampered by my minimal artistic skills) and moved on to other things.

This morning, I see that the story is at the top of the news. Breaking News: Boy didn’t make trip to heaven. So, what the hell (so to speak). Because I noticed something that others do not seem to have noticed.

Esperanto on the Job

How do I put this on my timecard?

It would probably make the news even today if the employees of the Organization of American States had a compulsory lecture on Esperanto. That’s what happened in Washington, D.C. on January 15, 1910 to the office staff of the Bureau of American Republics (the predecessor organization to the OAS). The staff probably knew it was coming, since John Barrett, the director of the BAR was also the president of the Esperanto Association of North America.

Of course, Barrett didn’t give the lecture himself. That would have been somewhat embarrassing, since it was noted that after his election as the head of EANA, he needed to step up his progress in Esperanto. I, personally, have no sympathy for him. It doesn’t take all that much effort to master Esperanto. It’s not that Barrett couldn’t find someone who was competent and willing to give lessons. His lecturer, Professor Arnold Christen, gave lessons at the princely cost of $4 for four lessons.

Not to Badmouth the Pope’s Mother

Careful what you say
about his mother!

I have no intention of saying anything bad about the Pope’s mother. I’m sure she was a perfectly nice Argentinean woman.[1] I will say nothing bad about her. I know nothing bad about her, and it would be the sheer caddishness to invent scandal. That said, her son is dead wrong in some recent statements.

Even the Pope has jumped on the Charlie Hedbo bandwagon with an opinion.[2] The Pope feels that there should be a limitation to free speech. No criticizing religions. He compares criticizing religion to a friend speaking ill of the Pope’s mother. This is such a surprise: the leader of one of the world’s largest denominations feels that religions should be above criticism. Excuse me, your Holiness, but are you fucking kidding me?

Je Suis Encore Charlie

Tous les jours

In the aftermath of the shootings at Charlie Hebdo came the wave of people saying “Je suis Charlie.” I was one of them. Bill Donahue was not, instead blaming the murders on the cartoonists. I initially allowed myself the self-congratulatory view that more of us were Charlie than not, but as the stories unfolded and people had time to reflect, they started announcing that they were not Charlie, and neither were you. I say fuck that.

I’m not much of a provocateur as a writer; I admit that freely. My work never verges into the pornographic. I don’t engage in scatalogical humor.[1] I don’t mock religion. The most fervent responses I got were when I proposed that certain word choices in the Esperanto translation of the Bible indicate that Zamenhof either used Christian sources, or his translation was subsequently altered by the organization which prints it.[2] I doubt the Ido community is about to call for my head over my statements about the birth of that language.[3]

One line of reasoning is that we are not Charlie Hebdo because we do not engage in their level of provocation. That comes dangerously close to blaming the victims. Oh, if you only hadn’t been quite so provocative. We’re saying “fuck that,” remember? Maybe my voice will never get provocative. Or maybe a piece I write down the road really pisses someone off. Am I Charlie then?

In the New Yorker, Teju Cole brought up the example of the neo-Nazis marching in Skokie, a right which was protected by the ACLU.

The extreme offensiveness of the marchers, absent a particular threat of violence, was not and should not be illegal. But no sensible person takes a defense of those First Amendment rights as a defense of Nazi beliefs.

But I’ve taken part in marches that counter-protesters thought were extremely offensive (yes, this middle-aged gay man has marched in Gay Pride parades[4]). I’ve walked past people who were screaming hate and obscenities because I was exercising my civil rights. Sure, my beliefs are on the side of increased liberty, freedom, equality, and self-determination. It’s easy to endorse me and my beliefs, but to many of those counter-protestors, I was probably indistinguishable from a Neo-Nazi.

I have been willing to be provocative, though never (in my not so humble opinion) for the sake of provocation. I can think of two occasions when people defending bans on same-sex marriage used arguments that could have been applied in support of neighborhood exclusions of blacks and Jews. Yeah, I went there. It felt good. On one of those occasions, I prefaced my remarks with “to begin, you’re full of shit, and speaking from a place of heterosexual privilege.”[5] I just haven’t done anything like that on this blog. Yet.[6]

David Brooks said that he wasn’t Charlie Hebdo, and that’s his right. But when he says that:

Most of us move toward more complicated views of reality and more forgiving views of others.

I think of the times when gay people were mocked for even thinking they might seek equality. I think that was yesterday. (Actually, over on his blog, Rod Dreher was writing in defense of the former Atlanta fire chief who wrote a book comparing gay people to pedophiles and those who have sex with animals. It’s not all that clear whether Dreher disavows that view or considers it an “orthodox Christian view.” Dreher even titled his blog post “NYT: ‘Je Suis Charlie Hedbo Homo.’” Hi-lar-i-ous.)

Others have realized that they had been the target of Charlie Hebdo’s mockery. Bill Donahue didn’t forget it for a moment, remembering that the magazine was against Catholic authoritarianism. So he badmouthed the dead on CNN, then on Fox, and when a fellow conservative called him on it, did not back down. When conservatives walked back their initial support for Charlie Hebdo, I was disappointed, but not surprised. They are the crowd that feels that freedom needs to come with limitations, if not for them, then for me and you. Fine, they are not Charlie Hebdo, but I am not going to listen to them when they say that I am not either.

One commentator noted that for all our statements of support, it’s not as if Americans are going to be subscribing to the magazine. I looked on Amazon: it’s $181.39 per year. That’s a lot of cash to lay out for showing one’s support of freedom of expression. There must be a better way. Yet, the next time I’m in France, I’ll make a note to buy a copy. Just because. But no, I can stand behind the right of the creators of Charlie Hebdo to express themselves and still say that it’s too damn expensive to get a print copy of a French magazine.

It’s been a week since the shootings at Charlie Hebdo. A couple days after, despite my general lack of illustration skills, I sketched out a (mediocre) illustration of a bearded wearing a turban, holding a pencil, and saying, “Je suis Charlie.” It was the obvious illustration, still, I was a little disappointed when I found that it has been executed by a competent illustrator for the January 14 issue. You bastards stole my idea!

In a way, the great, tragic joke of it all was that the murderers would have done a better job of whipping Charlie Hebdo away if they had done nothing. The magazine was going under financially. Their fundraising appeal had gone flat. Had the murderers kicked back in that park in the Seventeenth Arrondissement, Charlie Hebdo probably would have folded before too long. Now? There’s no way the French will let Charlie Hebdo fold now. Now it’s a symbol of freedom.

Let us not forget January 7. When it comes around again, let’s not look back and wonder why we shrugged off supporting freedom of expression. Let’s remember that this is one of our great values. No one should have to worry that they’re being too provocative. No one’s religion deserves a veto over other people’s lives.[7] If you think your religion allows you to shut other people up, you’re doing it wrong. If you think gay people getting married tramples on your religion, you’re doing it wrong.[3]

Not just on January 7, but all year round: Je suis Charlie. Je suis encore Charlie. Je suis toujours Charlie. Je suis Charlie dans mon coeur.

#JeSuisCharlie

---

1. Though I do love a good dirty joke.  ↩
2. You make no friends telling Esperantists that you think Zamenhof made a bad translation.  ↩
3. Et aussi, tu es con. And you’re an asshole too.  ↩
4. Film at 11.  ↩
5. There are people whose lack of concern over same-sex marriage seems to be directly related to being straight, hence it doesn’t interfere with anything they want to do. Standard conservative lack of empathy.  ↩
6. The blog is only eight months old. Give me time.  ↩
7. Islam? Who the fuck is talking about Islam? I’m talking about those asshole Christian conservatives whose want us to think that if same-sex couples get married, baby Jesus is going to poop his diaper. Yeah, let’s write a big, ugly exception to equal protection under the law so that Christians get to legally discriminate against gay people in all states, instead of just lots of them. (This gives me the idea for another post.)  ↩

Lustful Thoughts About Merkel

Safe for work

The attacks on Charlie Hebdo and their aftermath continue to make the news. We're moved from the news, to the reactions to the news, and now we're on to reactions to the reactions to the news. You are no doubt aware that there was a massive rally in support of freedom of expression Charlie Hebdo in Paris and that world leaders gathered together in a staged photograph solidarity. (No surprise, really. Does anyone think their security details would have let them mingle with 1.5 million people?)

In the front of the group, are the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, Frederica Mogherini, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, and Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris. I'm not going to name anyone else in the group, because it's a little off topic. Back to Merkel.

Socialists Vote on Esperanto

Uniĝu, Laboristoj de la Mondo!

In the early twentieth century, many movements that were, or aspired to be, international glommed onto the Esperanto movement. How could you be international without an international language? Further, there was the (never realized) expectation that in the near future, everyone would speak Esperanto. Why would you want to deprive these people of your important message?

World-wide, the socialist movement found uses for Esperanto, particularly in that it allowed workers with different native languages to easily communicate with each other. This was true especially in the United States where the labor movement comprised immigrants from around the world. A 1907 article on coal miners adopting Esperanto noted that the miners spoke a variety of languages.

Esperanto in Borneo

His name was known
in Borneo

On Sunday, January 13, 1907, the Washington Times included an article about Esperanto in its magazine section. It looks at the great prospects predicted for Esperanto in the coming years. To put this into some historical context: the meeting where Ido was unveiled was still about ten months away. In 1907, things were looking up for Esperanto.

The item in the Times is just a bit of a puff piece. We get a nice picture of Dr. Zamenhof, and a summary of some of the things that are going on around the world. The subhead states “Religious papers publishing primers of new tongue and missionaries in Borneo are using this language.” Were there really Esperanto speakers in Borneo? Yes, there were.

Esperanto — A New Language in Germany

Esperanto's first magazine

One of the great early moments in the history of Esperanto was the defection of the Nuremberg Volapük Society, which abandoned Volapük for Esperanto as a group. At the time, the Volapük movement was already on the skids, but instead of just dissolving with the rest of the Volapük movement, the Nuremberg group stayed with the idea of an international language.

It was not, apparently, without problems with for the Esperanto movement. On the Wikipedia page for Leopold Einstein, Zamenhof is quoted as saying that the Nuremberg group brought the spirit of reform from Volapük to Esperanto. On the other hand, it also brought with it a magazine. The publication, La Esperantisto, mentioned in the article was the first periodical published in Esperanto. Leopold Einstein encountered the Unua Libro in 1888[1] and September 1889, the club was publishing La Esperantisto.[2]

That (Non) Spaniard Who Created Esperanto

Still not Spanish.

Sometimes you have to make decisions. On January 3, I saw that the New York Sun had published a short item on Esperanto in 1904 that was filled with errors. Instead, as I only had time for one post, I wrote about Edwin S. Du Poncet, who was the instructor of languages at the Throop Institute (later named the California Institute of Technology). Then I saw that on January 6, 1907, the Sun had again erroneously ascribed Esperanto to he work of a “Spanish scholar.” I wrote about that one, and the rebuttal given by a reader, one H. G. P. on January 9, 1907.

It turns out that they had been corrected before, but not only were they not terribly gracious about the correction, they forgot all about it, or ignored it as being spurious. On January 10, 1904, they noted that “a disgruntled Esperanto enthusiast” had found problems with their January 3 item. After crankily dismissing the statements, the Sun goes on to cite the authority for their (wild) claim that Esperanto had been invented by a Spaniard. I raised the question of why the Sun thought this; now I know why. I have two more questions, but I’ll get to those later.

No Esperanto Peasant Talk

"Is this what Esperanto looks like?"
"Not really."

Translators sometimes face the problem of what do you do when faced with an original that represents substandard speech: things that are ungrammatical or mispronounced or use slang. This is going to be a particular problem in a planned language; you don’t have a population speaking a lower-class dialect.[1] A clever translator could get around this, but the lack of lower-class dialect isn’t really much of a criticism of a language.

It was a pretty slender thread from which John Hearn’s criticism of Esperanto hung in the January 9, 1909 New York Times. Mr. Hearn had an obvious ulterior motive in criticizing Esperanto: he was an proponent of Ido.[2] Except in January 1909, the language was still being called “Ilo.”[3] Hearn had written the New York Times before, but in 1908, he was still supportive of Esperanto, but he was part of the group in the New York Esperanto Society that had gone over to Ido. That group included Dr. Max Talmey, who became the treasurer on his return to the organization.[4]

Zamenhof Not a Spaniard

Not a Spaniard

But we knew that already.

I was not the first person to notice that the New York Sun implied that the creator of Esperanto was a Spaniard in their editorial on January 6, 1907. One of their readers did. No full identification was given, just the correspondent’s initials, H.G.P. The Sun’s typesetters also seemed unfamiliar with the use of D^r as an abbreviation for “Doctor.” Where the writer intended D^r Esperanto, the Sun gave us “D’Esperanto.”  I’ve left it as they typeset it.

In this, it mangled the name of the work by Henry Phillips, Jr., based on the Unua Libro, which should be properly given as “An Attempt Towards an International Language, by Dr. Esperanto, (Warsaw, Russia).” The author’s name is not part of the title.

The Gay Blackmail Confession

Scandal!

The Cleveland Street Scandal, in which a male brothel was found to have been operating on Cleveland Street in London (hence the name) was the one of the precursors to the Oscar Wilde trial. The scandal in 1889 allegedly involved aristocrats who had had sex with male prostitutes, much of this was hushed up. Things were much more explicit (though tame by our standards) when in 1895, Oscar Wilde was tried on a charges of having sex with other men.

As Wikipedia points out,[1] Charles Hammond, the brothel keeper, managed to flee the country. Wikipedia doesn’t say where, but on January 8, 1891, two years after the scandal, the Los Angeles Herald reported that Hammond was arrested in Seattle. He had been accompanied by one of the young men, Herbert John Ames, who had been working at the house from June of 1888 until its closure in 1889. To make it clear, he was about sixteen when he started turning tricks.[2]

The Reverend Professor Esperantist

Floyd Barnes Hardin
Initially enthusiastic about
Esperanto

Floyd Barnes Hardin was born on May 4, 1886, making him just slightly one year older than Esperanto.[1] When he founded the Moline Esperanto club, he was just twenty-two years old, and styling himself Reverend Hardin. Oddly, he seem to disappear from the Esperanto movement not long after. It may be that founding the Moline club, a sequel to his founding the club at the University of Chicago in 1907, was his swan song in the Esperanto movement. Despite the frequency in which he shows up in Esperanto publications from 1907 through 1909, after that he’s gone. The final reference to him seem to the be Adresaro of 1909, the address list of American Esperantists that appeared in April of that year.[2]

In various Esperanto publications he’s referred to as either “Professor” or “Reverend.” I guess if you start the school, you can give yourself a professorship. The December 1907 Amerika Esperantisto references him with the words “oni devas diri ‘Rev.’” (one should say “Rev.”), without explaining why one should. Though “professor” was self-conferred, he really was a minister. A page written by one of his descendents notes that he was a Methodist minister, but the Unitarian Year Book for 1909 lists him as a Unitarian minister in Moline, Illinois.

Je Suis Charlie

Je Suis Charlie

Bonjour, je suis Charlie. No, I’m not converting this into a blog written in French; my skills are nowhere near to up to it. But today, je suis Charlie.

I woke to the news that gunmen had massacred the staff of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. I had heard of the magazine before, though I’ve never read it. If I’m going to read a French periodical, it’s typically Têtu, the French LGBT magazine. I always figured that Charlie Hebdo would be a mix of cultural references I didn’t know (“who is that guy supposed to be?”) and slang that was unaware of (“there’s no entry for that in my Larousse”). But today, je suis Charlie.

The early news on the massacre reported that the gunmen yelled out slogans in Arabic. The police have identified three suspects, but until the police actually name the suspects and a case is made, I don’t want to leap to any conclusions. On the other hand, I don’t want to be Bill Donahue of the Catholic League, who actually sympathized with the killers. The one consolation is that it shows that Bill Donahue doesn’t have to be lying about gay people in order to be a disgusting asshole. In a reasonable world, no journalist would ever again want to sit near Donahue. He made his remarks on CNN; I’m sure they’ll have him back.

Zamenhof — A Naive and Simple Soul

"A naive and simple soul"

That was the assessment of Doctor Zamenhof given by the New York Sun on January 6, 1907, in response to a piece by Zamenhof (translated) in the North American Review of January 4, 1907,[1] although that’s not what the autobiographical note expresses to me.

The Sun also contains one curious error (which I have seen elsewhere). Despite having Dr. Zamenhof’s biography in front of them, the Sun makes the strange claim of attributing the language to a Spaniard. I know that, later in his life, he was granted membership in the Spanish Order of Isabella the Catholic (making him Sir Ludovik?), that was in the future and does not a Spaniard make. In any case: Zamenhof, not Spanish.

Russian Sociologist Praises French, Dismisses Esperanto

Jacques Novicow
Russian. Spoke French.
Disliked Esperanto

The Russian sociologist, Jacques Novicow (French Wikipedia helpfully gives his Russian name as Iakov Aleksandrovitch Novikov) wrote in the December 1, 1907 Revue des Deux Mondes 0n the subject of an international auxiliary language. As I’ve indicated in the title, he was in favor of French. His article, all thirty-six pages of it, isn’t just for talking up French, but for dismissing Esperanto as a particular alternative to French.[1]

Novicow was (according to French Wikipedia) born in Constantinople, and raised in Odessa, where he eventually became a professor. However, he spent some time (Wikipedia notes only “partie de sa vie”—part of his life) in France, and published extensively in French. Two titles jumped out at me: Le Peril jaune (The Yellow Peril[2]) (1897) and L’Avenir de la race blanche, critique du pessimisme contemporain (The Future of the White Race, a critique of contemporary pessimism) (1897). He also separately published his Revue des Deux Mondes piece in 1911.

Prison Officers Plan to Learn Esperanto

P.S. The enemy plans a surprise attack

Until after World War I, there was no established right for prisoners to correspond with their families (that wouldn’t come about until the Geneva Convention of 1929, and the Washington Internacia Klubo, one of the Washington, D.C. Esperanto clubs of that period[1] didn’t qualify as an international relief organization. Nevertheless, they did manage to get a letter from a Bulgarian Esperantist who had been captured by the Romanians.

It’s not clear, looking at the history of the region, how long the letter was delayed. The Washington Herald reported on this on January 4, 1914. On that date, Bulgaria and Romania weren’t a war with each other. Conflict between Bulgaria and Romania in the Second Balkan War had ended on July 25, 1913, and Romania didn’t enter World War I until August 27, 1916. When the Herald made its report, there hadn’t been any hostilities between the two countries for five months, and hostilities wouldn’t recur for more than two years (and WWI had yet to commence). Yet the described situation doesn’t fit the idea of a civilian prison.[2]

Pasadena Professor Eminent in Esperanto

Can Throop spell "instructor"?

The January 3, 1908 Los Angeles Herald made note of an appointment at the Throop Institute, an educational institution founded seventeen years before and far better known by the name that it would adopt twelve years later. The article made a particular note that the new professor of modern languages was an expert on Esperanto, an association that would be repeated over the years, despite that Professor Du Poncet seems to have made little mark, in or out of the Esperanto movement.

Du Poncet wouldn’t be at the Throop Institute for long. According to news reports he left there for the University of Redlands after one year, and then was off to teaching high school students in Utah a year after that. The Herald gets his name slightly wrong, spelling it “Du Ponset,” which made searching tricky.

John Barrett’s New Year’s Resolution: Learn Esperanto

Seven months! Plenty of time!

John Barrett was a career diplomat,[1] notable (in part) for being the first director of the Bureau of American Republics (the predecessor to the current Organization of American States). He was also the second president of the Esperanto Association of North America (something not mentioned in the Wikipedia entry). As 1909 became 1910, Mr. Barrett has something of a New Year’s resolution. He had one shortcoming as the newly elected EANA president: he didn’t actually speak Esperanto.

The early days of the Esperanto movement in the United States attracted some well-connected individuals. Barrett’s predecessor was George Harvey, the publisher of the North American Review (although it seems that Henry James Foreman, the magazine's associate editor[2] was the real Esperanto enthusiast at the North American Review). Like Mr. Barrett, Mr. Harvey doesn’t seem to have actually learned Esperanto.