Al Miaj Legantoj

Vi ne estas forgesitaj. La blogo daŭros. Dum la lastaj kelkaj tagoj mi ne skribis ĉar mi estas ĉe la 100a Universala Kongreso en Lillio. Bedaŭrinde, mi ne havas la tempon por verki aliajn artikolojn. Antaŭ mi eliris mian domon, mi demandis min ĉu mi devas afiŝi noton ke mi havus ferion. Finfine, mi diris ne. “Mi havas multe de blogaĵojn. Neniu noticos se mi ne verkas.” Mi malpravas.

Do, mi pardonpetas, miaj karaj legantoj. Ŝajnas ke kelkaj aliaj kongresanoj sciis ke mi ĉeestus, sed hodiaŭ, viro haltis kaj diras al mi ke li legas mian blogon. La sama okazis je aliaj tempoj dum de la kongreso (sed, ne la sama viro).

An Army of Esperantists!

The Esperanto movement
wasn't really that organized.

It seems unlikely, but so mocks the writer of a column in the New-York Tribune of July 23, 1908. Did the Esperanto movement, at that point in its earliest moments in the United States, resemble a nascent government in any way? The satire in this one seems to be laid on just a tad too thickly. The first Esperanto congress in the United States had raised the banner of the Esperanto movement, but although this was the first time the flag had been raised on US soil, it wasn’t exactly a banner of conquest.

It may even be that that Esperanto movement was more-or-less collateral damage on this part, since many of the terms cited speak to American exceptionalism, which might be the real target here. The topics that Esperanto orators were described as eager to talk about were already the topics of American political figures.

Esperanto’s One Advantage

Harsh words from a small paper

At least, according to the County Record of Kingstree, South Carolina. There were certainly more advantages to Esperanto than as determined by the Record, but they found only one. We can probably attribute the short editorial statement to Louis J. Bristow, the Editor and Proprietor of the County Record. According to a contemporary American newspaper directory, the circulation of the Record was estimated at fewer than a thousand subscribers.

At the time that Mr. Bristow was writing about Esperanto, it was still fairly new. This was printed not long before the tenth anniversary of the publication of the Unua Libro. Unlike Volapük, the first decade of Esperanto was fairly quiet. In the course of a decade, Volapük had managed to go from publication to the total splintering of the movement. Esperanto took things slowly.

Everybody Works in Esperanto

Except it's really bad Esperanto

You may not know the song “Everybody Works But Father,” but it was a hit of the vaudeville era. The 1905 song is significant enough to have a Wikipedia entry, and was recorded by artists of the day such as Billy Murray and Bob Roberts (later, it was in the repertoire of Groucho Marx). (Just a note: both of those links are for 1905 recordings of the song, so if you’ve never heard of “Everybody Works But Father,” this is your chance to not only hear of it, but to hear it.)

The Chicago News probably assumed that most of their readers would know the song (unlike most of my readers), although it’s not clear from where the Esperanto translation came. Like many early purported samples of Esperanto, it lacks accented letters and makes plenty of errors. Of course, in that day, if you wanted to typeset Esperanto, instead of learning how to hit the right key combinations on your computer (of which there were exactly none in 1906), you had to order special type, which makes me wonder if Esperanto typesetters ever ran out of certain letters.

Khayyam and Esperanto

A very rare book

I love old books. I could easily be blogging about my love of poking around used bookstores, sometimes coming home with piles of old things. I love old books. Every once in a while, you find something that’s a bit of a rarity, but the book that was described in the New York Times on July 17, 1909 was a true rarity: it was produced in an edition of twenty-copies. That’s all.

The book in question is an Esperanto translation of the Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám based on the translation by Edward FitzGerald. My searching lead me to a bibliography of the Rubáiyat, which lists the first Esperanto translation as coming in 1915 (which was the product of John Pollen, the head of Esperanto Association of Britain). But Pollen’s 1915 translation of of Khayyám can’t the be subject of a 1909 bookstore ad. I mean, advance copies are one thing, but what bookstore can get a book six years before it’s printed?

A Canadian President for Esperanto Group

Bardorf

On July 15, 1921 the Esperanto Association of North America elected a new president. This is not the sort of thing that makes the news any more, but in 1921 it was reported in at least two newspapers, both from the District of Columbia, the Washington Post and the Evening Star. By 1921, the EANA was long out of Washington D.C. (they relocated to West Newton, Massachusetts in 1913), so it wasn’t even local news.

It was something of a first for the organization. The new president, Charles F. Bardorf was the first president of EANA who was not an American citizen. He was citizen of Canada. He was also first European immigrant to head the organization. And, he was the first chemist to lead the group. (Not sure how many, if any, seconds there were of any of these.) Charles F. Bardorf was the seventh president of the Esperanto Association of North America. The group was the Esperanto Association of North America in more than just name: from the beginning it included Canadian members and clubs, although the American side dominated it. There was also a Canadian Esperanto Association. Oddly enough some of the Canadian Esperanto groups were affiliated with the British Esperanto Association.

It hit the papers the following day, although the Post still referred to the events as happening “today.” In the Evening Star, it’s a very brief article, tucked in at the bottom of a page.

The Ice Warriors — Blogging Doctor Who

The First Doctor would
have told them to
speak up!

There’s a temptation to call “The Ice Warriors,” which is padded out at six episodes, “glacial” (there, I’ve done it). Trimmed down to five episodes it might have been better. Maybe even four. The main problem is that the “ice warriors” don’t make particularly good villains. I’m not even certain what their objective was in the story (and wouldn’t that objective change, given that an unspecified number of years had passed?).

But first, some background. The Tardis materializes on its side, leaving the Doctor and his companions to scramble awkwardly out the door. You would think the thing would have some sort of automatic adjustment for upright (in relation to local conditions) and stable (though the plot device of the Tardis landing somewhere that couldn’t support it had been used before and would be used again). They’ve arrived somewhere in Britain, but mistake it for Tibet (the location of the previous—and lost—adventure) as the Earth has entered a new ice age.

An Esperanto Opera in Chicago

Open wide and say
"Saluton!"

Well they both couldn’t be the fifth United States Esperanto congress, and really this is a question of the Chicago Daily Tribune making a small but important error in their article of July 13, 1914. The fifth United States Esperanto congress had been held in Boston in July 1912. I am slowly building a list of these, as I hit references to specific conferences.

Let’s put this in context: on June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated, throwing Europe into crisis, but the war hadn’t started yet. The tenth Universala Kongreso was still being planned for Paris. And the 1914 congress of the Esperanto Association of North America was planned for Chicago. For its prospective attendees, the troubles of Europe were somewhat irrelevant. Finally, the Esperanto Association of North America had held a conference every year since 1908 (the conference at which it was founded). 1914 was the seventh.

North Dakota News of Esperanto

Civilization demands Esperanto!

The Pioneer Express of Pembina, North Dakota got to Esperanto fairly early. In July 1901, most people in the United States were completely unaware of Esperanto. There had been the occasional reference beforehand (dating all the way back to Esperanto’s introduction in 1887), but as Esperanto neared its fourteenth birthday, out of the slightly more 5,567 Esperantists (that number being the final name in the listings that ended for January 14, 1901), almost none were Americans.

[Digression 1. Esperantist 5,567 was Miss Ingeborg Bergqvist, of Södertelge, Sweden, and her name had been sent in by J. J. Süssmuth.]

[Digression 2. It’s not a solo project to create, so I won’t be the one, but it would be great to have a database of the early Esperantists listed in these directories. I really don’t want to type in tens of thousands of names; I just don’t have the time. Really, we need people to take ranges of a couple hundred names at a shot. Then I could simply search to find out how many Americans were in the international movement. Series XXI of the Adresaro de la Esperantistoj includes two Americans, neither of them in North Dakota.]

Esperanto at Twenty-Five

And the party is in Poland

It’s one of those accidents of history that the outlook for Esperanto looked better at twenty-five than it did a century later at one hundred twenty-five. In 1912, although the 1910 Universala Kongreso had been a bit of a disappointment (and financial loss for the Esperanto Association of North America), there was still hope in the United States Esperanto movement.

And so, when the Bridgeport Farmer of Bridgeport Connecticut wrote about the Esperanto movement on July 11, 1912, the national convention had just begun in Boston, and (as the article notes) many American esperantists were heading off to Europe for the Universala Kongreso in Krakow, Poland. Though the 1912 UK would be smaller than preceding or succeeding one, it nevertheless had nearly three times as many participants as the 1910 Washington UK.

An Esperanto Congress in Boston

Iru ni Bostonen!

I’ve said this before (and doubtless will say it again) that today the annual North American Esperanto Congress probably doesn’t even get media coverage in the town where it’s held. Certainly a check of Google News around the time of the meeting turns up nothing. I don’t know if the blame rests solely on the media, though I know I’ve been involved in large conventions and the local made no reference to the swarms of conventioneers. This was not the case when the Esperantists of North America met on July 9, 1912. There was press coverage.

I’ve found articles from the New York Evening World and the Washington, D.C. Evening Star, so this press coverage actually extended outside of the convention city, since the 1912 convention was in Boston. There was probably coverage in the Boston papers, but unfortunately, I don’t have access to any of them. The two articles are nearly identical to each other, with the only difference within the actual article being something that can be attributed to house style. That said, the ultimate source was probably a press release either from the Esperanto Association of North America or the New England Esperanto Association. At the time of the meeting, EANA was headquartered in the Boston suburb of West Newton, so there was probably some overlap between the two organizations.

Esperanto, a New Kind of Volapük

An Irish Esperantist
in Parliament

Not really, but that’s how the New York Times decided to explain it to its readers on July 4, 1903, reviewing J. C. O’Connor’s book Esperanto. They clearly got to this much earlier than the New York Observer and Chronicle, (which didn’t review it until June 28, 1906). Clearly, at the New York Times, they don’t let books sit around for three years while they decide whether or not to review it. They were prompt about this one.

The Times, oddly enough gets to the size of the book, and so for anyone not familiar with book sizes, the spine height of Esperanto, the International Language, the Student’s Complete Text Book is 17.5 cm, or as the New York Times put it, “a 16mo of 176 pages.” I’m familiar with the various book sizes, but tended to think of sextodecimos as being smaller than they actually are (and clearly I’ve been thinking of the next size down, octodecimo). In other words, it’s a small hardback, about the size of a paperback book. Easy to carry about in pocket or purse for use while on the train or while waiting in lines (“on lines” if you’re a New Yorker, or (as this is a British book) in queues).

Now the word “16mo” in the third line of the New York Times review holds no mystery as to its meaning, only as to why the Times decided to describe the book this way, instead of calling it “a small book of 176 pages.” Esperanto texts do tend to be short. Seven years after J. C. O’Connor, Ivy Kellerman Reed called her book A Complete Grammar of Esperanto. It is just a little taller than O’Connor’s book, so technically an octavo (or 8mo), but we’re talking about a half centimeter taller, and it comprises 334 pages. Not a huge book, but it is complete. An introductory text book in French or German would run to far many more pages and still leave plenty of grammar for the next volume.

Esperanto at the 1904 World’s Fair

It's a nice column head.

There seemed to be a running association between Esperanto and the World’s Fair, just one of those newfangled things of the twentieth century. You know, electricity, ice cream cones, Esperanto. It’s really something more minor than would be indicate by the article in the New-York Tribune on July 3, 1904. It’s not like there was a concurrent Esperanto congress (that would happen in 1915), or even a discussion of the choice of an international language (which had occurred without result in 1900) and it’s likely that many of the people who attended the Louisiana Purchase Exposition had no idea of the presence of Esperanto, as it seems much more limited than the Tribune indicated.

The Fair had stared on April 30, 1904, so it was in full swing by the time the Tribune reported on it. The Tribune also covers the spread of Esperanto to that point. In 1904, the number of Esperanto clubs in the United States was a solid zero; no one would form one for more than a year. However, the Tribune notes that both the Harvard University library and Boston Public Library already had books about and in Esperanto as early as 1904 (a time when every single book and pamphlet published in or about Esperanto would have been a short shelf).

Esperanto, The Improbable

Israel Gollancz
Not a fan of Esperanto

Duolingo is just another chapter in applying technology to language learning (not to knock Duolingo, I think it’s great). Its forebears included language lessons by early twentieth century cylinder recordings (including Esperanto), and radio was considered, as noted in a July 2, 1922 article in the Washington Post. At the risk of belaboring the point, radio is one of those technologies that can be called “the Internet of its day”; a technology that transformed how information was handled (until the next transformation).

Radio brought the world closer, and Wikipedia notes that in the 1920s, shortwave radio grew rapidly, “similar to the internet.” As sounds were being transmitted over ever-greater distances, there came the question of what language those sounds would be in. Several pundits, including Professor Arnold Christen, suggested that Esperanto be the language of the airwaves.