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, 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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A British Esperantist Writes the Sun

He might have to cancel his subscription

Imagine, if you would, just what it took to get a New York newspaper to Aldershot in the United Kingdom in 1906. The newspaper would have gone from the New York docks, across the ocean to England, and then from one of its ports to this town south west of London. Or perhaps the paper made its way all the way to London, and from there reached the gentleman from Aldershot. Certainly, a copy did, because the June 4, 1906 New York Sun contained a letter responding to an item in the April 8, 1906 issue.

If we assume that the Sun printed Mr. Robinson’s letter as soon as they received it, then the whole thing took a mere fifty-seven days., although most of those seemed to be involved in getting the Sun into Mr. Robinson’s hands, as he wrote his letter thirteen days before it was printed. April 8 was a big Esperanto day for the Sun, as they printed three items related to Esperanto on that day. One was a letter from John Twombly, responding to an earlier statement about Esperanto in the Sun. Directly beneath it (and I don’t know how I missed it), was another letter on the same subject (of Shakespeare in Esperanto), and then there a third item, unsigned (so we can assume it was an editorial), making some false statements about Esperanto.

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Future Nobel Laureate Nobly Lauds Esperanto

And this is the device that
I've labeled in Esperanto.

In 1904, the British chemist, Sir William Ramsay, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of the noble gases (note spelling). To stray far from my area of expertise, the noble gases are those that do not (typically) react with other elements. More than sixty years would elapse between Ramsay’s 1898 discovery of xenon and the 1962 creation of a xenon compound. The first noble gas discovered by Ramsay, however, was argon in 1895, when the Nobel Prizes were still five years in the future.

In addition to being the chemist who discovered argon, neon, krypton, and xenon, Sir William Ramsay was an early British Esperantist, and a member of the British Esperanto Association, which is one thing that doesn’t get mentioned on Wikipedia, although his association with Esperanto and the Internacia Scienca Asocio Esperantista is mentioned on Esperanto Wikipedia. Ramsay wrote a piece on radium which appeared in the British Esperanto magazine, The Esperantist.

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Russian Censors Study Esperanto

Esperanto: A force for
free speech!

It’s not like they were seeking to bring the world together in unity and peace. They were more afraid of what the Esperantists might be writing. This was one of the worries that Marcus Zamenhof, Ludivick’s father, had about his son’s creation. New language: not going to go over well with the Czarist officials. It’s entirely possible that Marcus Zamenhof’s motivation for destroying the predecessor to Esperanto, lingwe uniwersala, was not so much “don’t waste your life on this crazy dream,” but “don’t jeopardize my job,” since the elder Zamenhof had become a censor.

Marcus Zamenhof was still alive when Esperanto came to the attention of the Russian censors. He couldn’t have been happy about it. The censor’s office probably wasn’t happy when the censor assigned to study the language “died within a couple of weeks of learning the language.” Least happy would be the poor man who died, though I don’t think we can implicate Esperanto in the matter.

The United States has a long-standing tradition of freedom of the press, and so there hasn’t been a need for censors. The Sedition Act of 1798 was a notable blot on this tradition, and ironic given the role of seditious newspapers in spurring the Revolution. Its successor, the Sedition Act of 1918 was upheld by the Supreme Court, but subsequent decisions would seem to make clear a constitutional right to criticize the government.

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A Linguistic Romance

Here's the wedding announcement.

The Pensacola Journal ran an item in their social column on October 11, 1908 announcing the engagement of one linguist to another. Mr. H. F. Sexauer[1] was a former resident of Camp Walton, Florida,[2] while his bride-to-be lived in far off California, for which Mr. Sexuer had departed some time previously.

The article mentions that Mr. Sexauer was “an accomplished linguist,” but research indicates that a career that suggests that he was an accomplished bullshitter. I don’t want to be nasty about someone who was an early Esperanto speaker, but the claims made in the article just don’t add up, and I have to suspect that Mr. Sexauer was to blame.

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