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 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)?

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You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

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This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!