Esperanto and Tutonish

Said that Esperanto was
unjust to Teutons

Elias Molee, whose Teutonish I previously wrote about, was an American writer who created a series of languages based on an amalgamation of English and German. His father, according to Wikipedia, emigrated from Norway to Wisconsin in the early nineteenth century.[1] Molee was born in 1845, and lived in an area with a concentration of people who spoke Germanic languages other than English. At that time, many people in the United States used German as their primary language. The earliest reference to Esperanto I have found in an American newspaper is in German. (Der Deutsche Correspondent wrote about Esperanto on September 14, 1887, when the language was just eighty-five days old. I haven’t found a reference in an English-language newspaper before 1891.)

Molee’s language work stretched from 1888 through 1923, during which he issued a series of books and pamphlets in which he proposed, revised, and renamed the language that he felt people should be speaking. As noted in the piece in the Sun, he felt that after fifty years of study, everyone would be speaking Tutonish (or Amerikan, or Niu Tutonish, or Alltutonish, or Alteutonik) and that the existing Germanic languages (German, English, Dutch, Frisian, Swedish, and so forth) would simply be forgotten.

Of course he addressed Esperanto.

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Tutonish — From an “Economist of Language”

Why doesn't anyone
take me seriously?

The New York Sun spent almost an entire column on July 31, 1904 finding fault with Tutonish, a proposal for an universal language that was proposed by Elias Molee in 1902 and then subsequently revised by him several times. But unlike most of the languages cited in the article, Molee didn’t see his language as a means to ease international communication, but a replacement for the Germanic languages, including English.

Molee notes in Tutonish, or Anglo German Union Tongue (1902) that he expects criticism, “knowing full well the tendencies of the public to regard any innovation as the result of ‘Crankism.’” The Sun not only gave him the criticism, but clearly also viewed this as begin the work of a crank. The idea, mentioned below in the Sun article, of a conference in the Hague to settle the details of the language, is mentioned in the 1902 book, then elaborated in Molee’s 1904 publication, Tutonish, A Teutonic International Language.

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