Esperanto Lives! A digression into video blogging #EsperantoLives

I am in no way a video blogger. This blog has been quiet lately, because I've been very, very busy lately, and I haven't had the chance to put together a blog post. But, for Zamenhof Day, I decided to get in on the #EsperantoLives project and create a snippet of video.

It took me several tries to do it, and perhaps I should have decided that I wasn't going to do it in one three-minute take. There was the time the cat walked in the room and meowed loudly just as I was finishing up. There was the flubbed line. There was the "perfect" take, except I forgot to pitch Duolingo (I don't have to pitch Duolingo, but it's a good place to learn Esperanto.

If I had to do it again (and I suppose I could), I would be pointing out that the books at right shoulder include some books in or about Esperanto.

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Esperanto, the Uniter of Nations

Louis F. Post
Journalist, social reformer,
Esperantist

Expecting Esperanto to “unite nations” was probably somewhat beyond wishful thinking in October 1915. This was, after all, the year in which the Universala Kongreso had to be relocated since Germany had put all of waters around Great Britain into an exclusion zone, though which ships could only pass at their peril (ships like the Lusitania). The world, in 1915, seemed to be united only in so far that groups of nations were united in their efforts to conquer other groups of nations.

This did not stop Louis F. Post from extolling the virtues of Esperanto at a meeting of the Kolumbia Esperanta Klubo on October 14, 1915. It reached the pages of the Washington Post on October 17. There was certainly an aspect of preaching to the choir; you didn’t need to convince the Esperanto speakers of Washington D. C. that Esperanto was, on the whole, a good thing. Post was not the only speaker at the event, nor was the item in the Post the only article.

The Washington Times ran a long article on one of the other speakers, Hyman Levine, on October 14 (in advance of the evening lecture). Mr. Levine spoke on “Esperanto at Work.” The Times did a brief follow-up article on the meeting, but gave no detail of anyone’s statements. The Post quoted Mr. Post, probably not because of the similarity of names, but because he was the Assistant Secretary of Labor, a position he assumed in 1913, held until 1921, and for Wikipedia, is the start of his life story, merely omitting the first sixty-four years of his life.

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An Esperanto Marriage, But Not the First

S-ino kaj S-ro Parrish

Despite the belief expressed by the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, the September 12, 1912 marriage of Donald Evans Parrish of Los Angeles, California to Paula Louise Elisabeth Alexandra Christiana Grawe (or Paula Graves, as the articles had it) was not the first marriage of two Esperanto speakers. Even earlier accounts make it clear that other congress participants realized that—through Esperanto—they had found their soul mates. In 1908, the Esperantists Herman Sexauer and Frida Niedermuller married (in San Francisco). He was a German, she was an American.

Still, it is certainly an early such marriage, and marriages between Esperantists whose only common language is Esperanto are fairly rare, given the general rarity of Esperanto speakers in the world population (there are certainly Esperantist couples in which both individuals share a native tongue and speak Esperanto).

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Esperanto — The Most Neutral Thing

Tobias Sigel
Not a funny man.
Except the hair

An Esperantist walked into a bar… Okay, that’s a setup for a joke, but I’m not certain what the punchline should be. Maybe it’s better that way.

Most of the article that appeared in the October 13, 1914 Washington Post was concerned with the then-current antipathy the Canadians had for the Germans. Canada had been in the war since August 4, 1914 and the Canadians were ready to cast off all things German, just as Americans did after their entry in the war.

Groucho Marx, in his 1972 album An Evening with Groucho attributed anti-Germany sentiments in Canada to the Lusitania, noting, “I was supposed to sing a song, a German song, and I was afraid they were going to kill me if I did, that audience.” Groucho’s fears might have been appropriate even before the sinking of the Lusitania, which (after all) wasn’t a Canadian ship (it was British), wasn’t sailing from or to Canada (New York to Liverpool), and Canada was already at war with Germany when the Lusitania was torpedoed (May 7, 1915). It is entirely possible that Groucho decided it would be prudent not to sing “Oh, How That Woman Could Cook” (and here’s a 1915 rendition, so it stayed popular for a while).

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An Open Letter to Netflix

It's like a game! Can you find the three that match?

Update: I'm leaving this up, but as of October 13, 2015, everything I noted in this post has been fixed. See the end for further notes.

Dear Netflix,
It’s time to sit down and have a little talk about your interface. I know, I know, you were hoping that I was going to suggest that we “Netflix and chill,” but sometimes other things have to take priority. Yesterday, I sat down to see if there was something on Netflix I wanted to watch and experienced that same problem again, the one that makes me think that you don’t want to play nice. You know the one.

You see, Netflix, because this isn’t about me. It’s about you. Your interface is supposed to help me find a movie (or a television show) with which to pass the time. Lately, it seems not so much about what I want to watch, but what you want me to watch. Really, your opinions are not necessary here.

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An Esperantist President in Washington

Big man in the Esperanto movement

Despite Edwin C. Reed’s fairly central role in the U.S. Esperanto movement of the early twentieth century, there is no entry for him in the Esperanto-language Wikipedia, even though there is one for his wife, Ivy Kellerman-Reed. In a way, they seem to be Esperanto’s first power couple, she being a writer, editor, translator, and teacher, and he being guy who organized things. Organizing things can be less enduring; even if you put your stamp on an organization, organizations can quickly go from vibrant to nonexistent. While Dr. Kellerman-Reed’s books can still be found on bookshelves, her husband’s organizations are all now defunct.

Reed (and throughout, I’m going to distinguish them by referring to him as Reed and her as Kellerman-Reed) was the first secretary of the Esperanto Association of North America, but as the role of president seemed to be largely ceremonial, the actual administrative duties fell to the secretary. This probably hampered the organization’s ability to capitalize on its early growth, since it the actual presidents weren’t the slightest bit interested in being strong leaders, and the first two (while Reed was secretary) weren’t even Esperanto speakers. From about 1909 through 1913, Edwin C. Reed was pretty much the central figure in the U.S. Esperanto movement.

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Menus in Esperanto!

All we are saying
Is give Esperanto a chance!

Okay, that’s a bit of a tease, since the article in the Chicago Daily Tribune of September 24, 1910 didn’t uncover menus in Esperanto, instead it was a suggestion that restaurants adopt Esperanto for menus, instead of writing them in French. While it makes perfect sense for a menu of a Paris restaurant to be in French, it doesn’t make that sense in New York, even if the food offered dead-on traditional French food. There is an element of shtick to this.

Several years ago, I was in a not terribly restaurant in Washington, D.C., and on the menu were the words, “Ask about the *soup de jour.” Soup sounded like a good idea, so I saked.

“What’s the soup de jour?”

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An Early Chicago Esperanto Society?

William E. Curtis
What did he know about
Esperanto?

The column, “Matters of Interest to Women and About the Household” that appeared under the name Marion Harland was edited by the American writer Mary Virginia Terhune (she wrote a number of books under the name, including some novels and an autobiography). The column in the (Richmond, Virginia) Times of September 23, 1902, includes four photos of women’s hair styles (the fashion seems to be “adorned with artificial leaves and flowers”), a couple of recipes (the first done by weight, the second by volume measures), and in between, questions and answers.

I should note that though these were noted to be “For the Housewife,” they did not deal with domestic matters, for the most part. The first is on croquet rules, the second a series of disconnection questions (“Was any Pope of Rome a Mason?” “What is the square area of New York and of Philadelphia?”), and the third is how to contact the Ethical Culture Society. Not all questions get answered, and the final question (of nine) is one.

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Doctors Take Early Look at Esperanto

And a good attempt, at that

In Esperanto’s early period, there was much interest in the language in scientific circles, particularly medicine. This makes sense, since science is more firmly international than many of the other subjects of study. Poetry may be, as Robert Frost famously put it, “the stuff that gets lost in translation,” a carbon atom is a carbon atom, whether you’re in Germany, France, the United States, or Brazil (and everywhere else too—far off planets have carbon, but they don’t have the works of Shakespeare).

It was early lamented that at international scientific (and medical) conferences, people just couldn’t understand each other. You were just guaranteed that someone wouldn’t be able to to comprehend the language of at part of the sessions. (This actually still persists. I know of a conference that happened in Germany only a few years ago, at which some of the talks were in German, which not everyone there spoke. The main language of the conference was English, but talks could be given in German.) One of the early reviews of the first Esperanto Congress noted that it was an amazing thing that someone put together an international congress where everybody understood everything.

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Esperanto Becomes Popular

Popular is good.

I would think when a newspaper describes and article as “special” to that newspaper, that they’ve got some sort of exclusive on it, and not that it was written by a stringer and not a staff reporter. But for an article that appeared on September 10, 1905 in both Washington, D.C. Evening Star and the Omaha Daily Bee, the second meaning was clearly the correct one. Someone in London cabled off to the two newspapers (and doubtless others) news Esperanto activity in London following the excitement generated by the first World Esperanto Congress, the 1905 Universala Kongreso.

The tale told by the cablegram correspondent seems a little fanciful, but on the other hand, it was clear that there was a real surge of interest in Esperanto after the first congress. Certainly, not long after the New York Esperanto Society had to take measures to exclude those who wanted the prestige of being a member of an Esperanto society without the actual bother of learning the language.

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Esperanto and the Friends

Ĉu ni devas esti Amikoj?

Given the interest paid to Esperanto by various religious groups, it’s not surprising to find the Religious Society of Friends (that is, the Quakers) among their numbers. The event that caught the attention of the Quakers was the first Universala Kongreso in 1905. Just a few weeks after the close of the Congress, a brief item appeared in The Friend, a Religious and Literary Journal in their September 9, 1905 issue.

Certainly the Friends (and a whole lot of other people) could get behind the idea of reducing “ misunderstandings, quarrels, and stupid hatreds.” (Ah, if only a language could do that; you don’t actually become more saintly when speaking Esperanto.) The bulk of the article is a quotation from somewhere. The words aren’t familiar to me, but the bulk of the article is quoted, although no source is given.

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Zamenhof in the Independent

Did he really write
the article?

Zamenhof’s article “Esperanto: A New International Language” in the August 11, 1904 Independent is two long to include in full. Despite the attribution to Lazaro Ludiviko Zamenhof, it was probably translated from the Esperanto, although no such credit is given. If you’re interested in Esperanto, it’s well worth reading, since it’s one of the early statements about the language in English. My guess is that, despite the attribution, it was not written by Dr. Zamenhof, since it has a sort of third-party quality to it.

At some point, the Kansas City Journal (which is not available online) abridged this. This abridgment was then reprinted by the Los Angeles Times on September 8, 1904. Newspapers don’t seem to do this as much anymore, thought it’s become pretty standard for bloggers; rephrase and quote an article in an existing source.

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The Independent View of the First Congress

Just one big paragraph

The Independent, as Wikipedia points out, was a supporter of various progressive movements of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. For abolition, for women’s suffrage, and so, it should come as no surprise that their initial view of Esperanto was, on the whole, positive.

The 1905 Esperanto Congress, the first Universala Kongreso, was a big thing. It wasn’t the first international language congress, but the first two Volapük congresses were in a mix of German and Volapük, and the third was the one that brought that movement to its end. And now the Esperantists were trying it.

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A Linguistic Hodgepodge — Either Esperanto or English

Or, as we now say, "hodgepodge."

Reading the newspapers of a century ago is a great way to prepare yourself to rebut the current detractors of Esperanto, because, yes, their arguments are that old. Unfortunately, even though their arguments were rebutted a century ago (yes, even the “English is destined to become the world’s language”), the same arguments still manage to convince people. When you’re an American in a foreign hotel dealing with the clerk’s substandard English, you blame the poor clerk and not the situation that made the clerk expend time in learning a fairly difficult language.

But one of the oddest criticism is that it’s made up out of a bunch of languages, as if some other languages were some sort of seamless whole, sprung from the hearts of its speakers. There’s a graphic going about Facebook that states that English knocks down other languages in dark alleys and rifles their pockets for loose grammar. Vocabulary. English pillages vocabulary, not grammar. But we’re not alone.

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Esperanto Goes to War, Almost

Make Esperanto, Not War

One of the great promises of Esperanto is that it is significantly easier to learn than any national language (and, for that matter, many constructed languages). The only problem is that, easy or hard, a language doesn’t have much utility if you’ve no one to speak it to. (Personally, I expend some effort just so I can have a change to speak Esperanto with people.) The problem with this (as my own experience has demonstrated) is that you need someone else to have learned it, or you’re just babbling.

French, on the other hand, is fairly difficult language. There are tougher, but given the disconnect between pronunciation and spelling in French, and a good number of verbs which though not irregular, might be termed “idiosyncratic,” teaching the American troops French probably wasn’t high on the list of things to do in 1917. Writing to the the New-York Tribune, in a letter they published on August 31, 1917, James McKirdy of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania had another idea. Why not Esperanto?

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A Temperance Beverage for Esperantists?

Elbe nur malgranda glaso.

The Methodist weekly Zion’s Herald gave a somewhat snarky view of Esperanto in their issue of August 30, 1905. This was the magazine’s first encounter with Esperanto (they would go on to publish a few more articles over the next few years), occasioned by the first Universala Kongreso. The first few congresses were great opportunities for publicizing the Esperanto movement. This had been done before (by the Volapük movement), but no one had done it in the sixteen years following the last of the Volapük congresses.[1]

Esperanto had taken its time to grow slowly over the previous eighteen years, including an influx of former Volapük speakers as the Volapük movement crumbled. It’s not clear why it took until 1905 for the Esperanto movement to hold its first congress, although in 1891 (four years after the introduction of Esperanto) it hadn’t gone nearly as far as Volapük had in the same number of years. Volapük’s rise and fall encompasses a mere nine years; during the first nine years of Esperanto, it was still fairly obscure.

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The Esperantist Agricultural Expert

Li revas pri bienoj kaj Esperanto.

The Washington D. C. school board was probably well rehearsed on reasons why not to introduce Esperanto into the curriculum by 1914 when Richard Bartholdt, Representative from Louisiana, suggested that Congressional intervention might be the way to go. Their first encounter with the idea seems to be when Sara Crafts, a noted social reformer (and early Esperantis), attempted this in 1908. Even the students got involved with petitioning the school board to teach Esperanto in 1913.

With the suggestion raised in 1908, 1913, and 1914, the big missing number is 1910. You would think that with the Universala Kongreso in Washington D. C. in 1910 that local Esperantists would have been emboldened to bring up the idea once again. And you would think right. In August 1910 (presumably as part of the preparations for the 1910/11 school year), the Washington D.C. school board made their second evaluation of Esperanto in the public schools.

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An Esperanto Enthusiast in Ohio

Entusiasmo estas bona!

There were a series of letters to the Omaha Daily Bee in August 1915 debating the relative merits of Esperanto and a language that was championed and invented by one D. C. John, Monoglott. Though Mr. John said that he was “trying to prepare a Monoglott grammar,” (the language is referred to both as “Monoglott” and “Monoglot”; I’ve decided to use the version ending in two t’s) I have found no evidence that any such document was ever published. Many proposed international language projects turn out to be vaporware, with no final product ever seen. This is common and I continue to see evidence that people loudly announce language projects and then quietly slip out of view.[1]

It does not surprise me that no evidence exists for Mr. John’s Monoglott project beyond a few letters to the Omaha Daily Bee. On August 28, 1915, one more correspondent came into this conversation held in the Bee’s “Letter Box” column. It’s signed by James G. Hayden, who was eager to rebut the question of Monoglott as an Esperantist. Hayden left little trace of his activity in Esperanto, but there was sufficient information with which to identify him.

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The Long Plan for 1915

Personally, I want to know how
many members they had.

In 1912, the committee working on the Pan-American Esperanto Congress had no idea that their efforts would also incorporate the eleventh Universala Kongreso, since their hopes for another Esperanto congress in the United States weren’t receiving an enthusiastic response. Really no surprise, given that 1910 Universala Kongreso in Washington, D.C. was the second smallest ever (with only 357 participants), with the last time the a congress held in Europe had fewer than 1,000 participants was right before World War II (preceding an eight-year gap). The United States probably isn’t ruled out of hosting a congress, but it’s my guess that the UEA would want to see that 1,000 American participants were likely first.

In 1912, the Esperantists who met in Oakland were just planning the eighth national congress of the Esperanto Association of North America. The hopes of the Universala Kongreso returning to the United States had already been dashed with Edinburgh, Scotland chosen as the site of the 1915 Universala Kongreso. And that all changed in March 1915, with little time to turn this from a national congress to an international one.

In a way, as the smallest Universala Kongreso ever (and I doubt there will ever be a smaller one), the 1915 Kongreso really was a national congress with a bit of international tacked on. But they didn’t know that in 1912. They were just planning the EANA congress. The San Francisco Call ran an article announcing their meeting on August 27, 1912.

ESPERANTO ADVOCATES WILL MEET THURSDAY

OAKLAND, Aug. 26.—The monthly meeting of the Oakland branch of the Universal Esperanto association will be held in the Oakland high school Thursday evening. Papers will be read by Miss Emma Rathgeb, William T. Drake, Miss E. Stevens and Miss Alice Lercher. Edward Irving will read a paper on the value of Esperanto to science. A short talk will be given by L. H. Gorham, who will tell of the plans of the society, including the pan-American congress of Esperantists in San Francisco in 1915.

The date in question for the meeting was September 30, as the 27th was a Monday in 1915. That’s an awfully long lead-up to a convention that was only going to be a couple hundred people at best. It’s clear that in that era that was the size of the national congresses in the United States. So why three years in the planning? Couldn’t this have been handled in about a year or less?

Sadly, there’s not much value in reading a paper on the importance of Esperanto to science to a bunch of Esperanto supporters. Really, it’s the scientists that you need to convince. In any case, this seemed to be pretty standard for a meeting of the Oakland Esperanto Society, and the San Francisco Call was pretty good about letting the public know of their events.

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The Esperantists Hold a Congress

Still not taken seriously

There is a tendency in the early reports about Esperanto to continually emphasize the “newness” of the language, even as it it approached twenty years since it had been initially published. I keep coming back to the thought that the final Volapük congress took place only about nine years after Schleyer published that language, while there were eighteen years between the Unua Libro, the first book on Esperanto (not that it was called that at the time) and the first World Esperanto Congress (which was called by its participants the Universala Kongreso). And yet, when the Minneapolis Journal wrote about the first Universala Kongreso, they felt obligated to describe Esperanto as “the new tongue.”

The first Universala Kongreso occurred in Paris from 7th to the 12th of August 1905 in Boulogne-sur-Mer, with 688 participants.[1] It took some time for the news to go from Paris to Minneapolis, although there was a wire services article[2] which appeared on August 13, 1905 which preceded it. The earlier article was probably the source for this August 26 article.

This one combines a report of the congress with some thoughts about Esperanto, sort of giving us the bigger picture. Not just the congress, but also the importance of the congress.

The New Tongue.

When the papers announced a year or more ago, that the universal language “Esperanto” had been formulated, in the hope of undoing the mischief caused by the tower of Babel, people smiled and then forgot all about it. That is, most of them smiled and forgot. The rest of them began to study Esperanto. The result was that a congress of Esperantists has just been held in France, with delegates attending from France, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, Russia, Germany, Sweden and Canada. Speeches were made in Esperanto, everybody talked in Esperanto, and much to the pleasure of all concerted, everybody could talk with his neighbor, no matter what his nationality and native tongue. Esperanto, evidently, must be taken seriously.

While the Journal felt that Esperanto must be taken seriously, in the century since that sentiment was uttered, it’s unfortunately been viewed more as the exception than the rule. I just encountered someone who, after two months of study, was able to translate my Esperanto into English for people who were just starting out. Yes, Esperanto should be taken seriously.

But the Journal is off by a few years when it says that “the papers announced a year or more ago that the universal language ‘Esperanto’ had been formulated,” unless by “or more” we can understand it to mean “eighteen years prior.” Several newspapers in the United States wrote about Esperanto less than a decade after its publication, with a few even writing about Esperanto in 1887, the year of its publication.

People did seem to smile and forget. There seemed to be a need to continually re-introduce Esperanto, reminding us that someone had proposed the language, whether that person was a Spaniard, or had spent fifteen years in a Polish prison.[3] More than a century has passed since that initial gathering of people who could speak to his or her neighbor.

Typical of early twentieth-century writing, the Journal’s “his” is quite inaccurate. The Esperanto Wikipedia article on the “Unua Universala Kongreso de Esperanto” has a photograph of congress participants. The first row of the photograph has twenty-two people in it, all but three of whom are women (and there are other women in the photograph). In the center, amongst the women is Dr. Zamenhof, and two seats away from him appears to be Émile Boirac, who chaired the congress. The person I’m most curious about is the man on the right edge of the photograph. With no chair available for him, but clearly wanting to be in the front row, he is reclining in front of three women.

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1. There’s an excellent summary at the Esperanto Wikipedia entry UK 1905.  ↩
2. Other matters prevented me from getting to it, which is a shame, because I skipped it in 2014 intending to write it up in 2015 (the 110th anniversary). I’ll slip it in out of date.  ↩
3. Zamenhof was twenty-seven when he published Esperanto. Do the math.  ↩

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An Esperanto Congress at a Time of War

How international
was it really?

August 23, 1915 was the opening day of the eleventh World Esperanto Congress, the Universala Kongreso. It’s not wholly the fault of the San Francisco committee that it was the smallest on record (a mere 163 participants). After all, until the outbreak of WWI in August 1914, the plan had been to hold the 1915 Universala Kongreso in Edinburgh, Scotland. But there was a war on. Plans for the Kongreso don’t seem to have started until March 1915, although the committee actually had been working on this since 1915.

In 1915, the United States was still maintaining its neutrality in WWI, which at that point wasn’t per se a “world war” (the term only came into use after the end of WWII, renaming the earlier war; personally, I lean to the view that there was a cease-fire of about twenty years within a single conflict). Although, one of the papers that covered the opening of the 1915 Kongreso, the Bemidji Daily Pioneer has a comic strip, Scoop, The Cub Reporter, on the same page as one of the articles about the Kongreso. In the strip, the characters are on a ship worrying about the potential for being struck by a torpedo. While the war in Europe was far from the waters Bemidji, Minnesota, it was clearly still on their minds.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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Esperanto on Street Cars

Somewhat dated, alas.

Oh, were this the reality now, and perhaps it will be again. I’ve been making periodic checks of the number of people who have signed up for Esperanto lessons on Duolingo. As of today (June 28, 2015), it is just past thirty-seven thousand.[1] In a way, it resembles the wave of enthusiasm that happened in the United States from about 1906 through 1912.

In the “Book Chat” column of the June 28, 1906 edition of the New York Observer and Chronicle, that’s exactly the vision brought forth by the writer: “it would not be surprising to hear ‘Esperanto’ conversations on board the street cars.” It would be today. I have the sneaking suspicion that there were more Esperanto speakers in 1915 New York than there are throughout the entire United States in 2015 (I hope I’m wrong).

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A (Partial) History of Same-Sex Marriage

Marriage. Nothing new.

Same-sex couples may now marry in all fifty states, and people are beginning work on histories of the marriage-equality movement.[1] I hope that these histories go back far enough. There is a stark difference between this history of same-sex marriage and the history of same-sex marriage in the United States.

When I was listening the Obergefell hearing, I was not particularly surprised that several justices brought up the question of whether there were historical examples of same-sex marriage. I actually think this line of questioning was profoundly irrelevant. We can find plenty of historical examples, and even contemporary ones, for things that are prohibited by the constitution. I don’t need to go deep into history to find examples of the suppression of freedom of speech. Just as a lack of freedom of speech in other places and times says nothing of our rights, a lack (or even existence) of same-sex marriage in history would say nothing about whether or not it was part of basic human liberty.

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Marriage Equality — At Last!

Let freedom ring!

I’ve been waiting a long time for this! I’ve been arguing in favor of same-sex marriage for more than twenty years. When California authorized domestic partnerships, I saw them as half a loaf (or maybe even less, given the limited rights initially granted, though even this was better than the almost completely symbolic domestic partnerships that the city of Laguna Beach offered in the early 90s).

Opposition to marriage equality came from not only those who sought to roll back gay rights, but also from those who, though in favor of gay rights, were either opposed to marriage itself, or felt that the gay community should be pursuing other goals. If you had asked me in 1995 if employment protections or marriage equality were more achievable, I would have said, “no doubt about it, employment.” I’ve seen arguments that we should have gone for ENDA. Employment protections are important, but during the same time that Obergefell moved through the courts, the Republicans have been in control of Congress. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act has no chance of budging in a Republican-controlled Congress. In other words, if all our efforts for marriage equality in the last five years had been applied to employment non-discrimination for LGBT people, we’d be in the same place on employment, and still not have marriage equality.

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Gambling in Esperanto

Baccarat? But I wanted
to study Esperanto!

Was every Esperanto club in 1907 Paris a front for a gambling den? It might seem that way. When I discovered an June 24, 1907 article about raid on a gambling den in Paris, I assumed it was the one that the WashingtonEvening Star had written about slightly later in 1907. Then I realized the names the proprietors were different. Did Paris really have two cunning ladies who decided that an Esperanto club would be the perfect cover for an illegal gambling den? At least that many. There were two separate raids on Esperanto clubs in 1907.

The article in the Los Angeles Times does not give the location of Madame Schwob’s gambling club. I’m going to make guess that it probably wasn’t too far off from Madame Beaujon’s secret club on the Boulevard Clichy, since another source does say that Madame Schwob also had an apartment on the Boulevard Clichy. I guess in 1907 it wasn’t just the place to go for an illegal baccarat club, but the place to go for an illegal baccarat club that was masquerading as an Esperanto group. But where did you go if you wanted your friends to think you were engaging in gambling, when you really just wanted to get together and talk Esperanto?

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The Tomb of the Cybermen — Blogging Doctor Who

A tomb? Don't you need
to be dead for one
of those?

At the end of “The Moonbase,” the Doctor expresses his wish that he not deal with the Cybermen again for a very long time. Had the BBC actually released the reconstructed “Underwater Menace,” there would have been a small break between “The Moonbase” and “The Tomb of the Cybermen.” Ironically, just after I finished watching “The Tomb of the Cybermen,” Amazon sent me an e-mail that “The Underwater Menace” was available for pre-order, but although they list a price, they don’t have a release date for it. I think we’ve heard this one before. So, instead, “The Tomb of the Cybermen” is the third of a sequence of Cybermen stories. The next serial I blog about will not have Cybermen in it (it’s an easy promise; I’ve already started watching “The Ice Warriors,” nothing’s showing up on my shelves that will make me say, “gotta watch this first”).

Our first encounter with the Cybermen was set in 1986, although it was a 1986 in which technology hadn’t much progressed beyond 1966. Then, we jumped forward to the only slightly more advanced time 2070, and everyone has assumed that the that the Cybermen were wiped out more than a century before with the destruction of Mondas. Now we’re at some unspecified future time when it is again believed that the Cybermen were wiped out years before. We’ve got a group that going to find their tombs. They have landed in the dorkiest-looking spaceship imaginable. On the other hand, we get a group shot of captain and crew, and I have to wonder if Captain Hopper chose his crew for looks, but I’ll get to that later. He clearly didn’t choose his spaceship for looks.

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Limericks in Esperanto

Ŝi havas grandegan kapon.

Here, once again, I’m complaining about journalists not doing their job. Even for a joke, you need to stick to the facts. The first cartoon with joking caption in the “Our Funny Man’s Column” in the Whitefish Pilot of June 22, 1911 makes a completely untrue statement about Esperanto. Where were the outraged letters to the editor noting that the Pilot had been complicit in spreading a scurrilous lie about the noble language Esperanto?

This was (at least as indexed at Chronicling America) the final time that the Pilot made any reference to Esperanto (Chronicling America only has it for 1908 through 1912, though the paper started in 1904 and is still published). The early press on Esperanto is filled inaccurate statements, including odd claims that the inventor of Esperanto was a Spaniard, or that he created the language while serving a long prison term. Not true. Not true.

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Veltlang at the Esperanto Meeting

The Veltlang Alphabet
Not sure if you can use it to write Esperanto

Veltlang clearly got more press than it deserved. Chronicling America has thirteen articles on it, ranging from its introduction in May 1910 through 1913 (when journalists seemed to tire of it). Its creator, Frederick Braendle, was a translator for the Pension Office (and so his designation of “Professor” was undoubtably self-conferred), who spoke sixteen languages. For the world, he gave English, slightly respelled with a new alphabet.

Those thirteen article are a bit too much coverage because Braendle’s only publication on Veltlang is a twelve-page pamphlet which gives little detail about the language itself (which, once again, is really English), and goes into greater detail of the somewhat mystical implications that Braendle felt his language had.

There does seem to have been a language, since he told the press the he used it in correspondence with friends. However, his book World-English, A New World Language, Veltlang, with English Words and English Grammar, Subject to the limitations of the phonetic writing of Veltlang, together with a simple phonetic world-alphabet, Seuastikon is his only book. (This title brings to mind the long titles of eighteenth-century novels, which are typically chopped down in modern editions.)

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The Third Esperanto Jest

On June 16, 1903, the Chicago Tribune humor column “A Line-O’Type or Two” included an item headed “Our Esperanto Department.” This was followed up on June 18 with the second “lesson” of “Esperanto in Six Easy Lessons.” If, on June 20, 1903, Tribune readers turned to the column with anticipation of more Esperanto, they were not to be disappointed.

Well, not yet.

Near the end of the column, Bert L. Taylor, did include a third Esperanto installment, this one titled “Esperanto in Six Easy Lessons—III.” I would caution anyone who thinks this might be a substitute for learning Esperanto on Duolingo, or with the book Saluton, or at the site Lernu, that Taylor’s “easy lessons” don’t actually teach Esperanto. This third installment brings up an interesting question.

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The Los Angeles Report on the Esperanto Congress

LA Times readers had an uncanny
experience of déjà vu.

Journalism by press release is clearly nothing new, given the overlap in information in the articles that appeared in the Los Angeles Herald and the Los Angeles Times on June 19, 1910. It’s also clear what the source of the article was: the Esperanto Society of Los Angeles, which managed to get a plug in for their own events. (I’d like to note here that while I struggle to maintain monthly meetings of my own Esperanto group, in 1910 there were weekly Esperanto meetings in Los Angeles. On the other hand, when I moved to California in 1991, there were weekly meetings in my area; that group has since folded.)

Because there is so much overlap, I’ve decided to take the irritating way out and combine the articles. I’ve set them below in three columns, the Herald on the left, the Times on the right, and everything where they’re using the same words is in the middle.

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A Jest for Esperanto 2 - A Lesson!

There's more Polish than Esperanto

“A Line-O’-Type or Two,” the humor column of the Chicago Tribune in the early twentieth century, wasn’t done with Esperanto with its entry of June 16, 1903. No, there was more to come. For the sake of history, let’s put this in some context. In June 1903, the first Esperanto group in the United States, the American Esperanto Association, was nearly two years in the future. The North American Review woulnd’t start its Esperanto lessons for another four years, and the establishment of the Esperanto Association of North America wouldn’t come for another five years. Even most of those referred to as “pioneers of Esperanto” in the United States had yet to learn Esperanto.

This joke is about as obscure as you can get. This was not the first reference to Esperanto in the Tribune, not even the first reference in the “A Line-O’-Type or Two,” but the preceding references in the Tribune were sparse enough that Chicago readers could be excused if they had never heard of it. Getting back to historical context, Chicago didn’t get an Esperanto group until three years later.

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Esperanto By Radio

Esperanto on the air

If you follow the sources, there’s some confusion about the middle name of the Esperantist radio expert mentioned in a short item in the June 17, 1922 Evening World. The World gives his name as “James Denison Sayers.” Geoffrey Sutton in Consise Encyclopedia of the Original Literature of Esperanto, 1887–2000 gives his name as “James Denton Sayers,” and on Vikipedio, he’s listed as “James Denson Sayers.” We’re giving this one to Vikipedio, since that’s he wrote on his draft registration cards.

Sayers (now that we’ve properly identified him), was a telegraph operator, novelist (including one in Esperanto), and founding member of the Esperanto League of North America (the organization that rose as a rival and successor to the Esperanto Association of North America, after EANA was pushed out of the Universal Esperanto-Asocio), and one distressing thing (I’ll get to it, reluctantly). At the same time, Arnold Christen was also talking about the important of Esperanto to radio.

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