Esperanto in Borneo

His name was known
in Borneo

On Sunday, January 13, 1907, the Washington Times included an article about Esperanto in its magazine section. It looks at the great prospects predicted for Esperanto in the coming years. To put this into some historical context: the meeting where Ido was unveiled was still about ten months away. In 1907, things were looking up for Esperanto.

The item in the Times is just a bit of a puff piece. We get a nice picture of Dr. Zamenhof, and a summary of some of the things that are going on around the world. The subhead states “Religious papers publishing primers of new tongue and missionaries in Borneo are using this language.” Were there really Esperanto speakers in Borneo? Yes, there were.

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Professor Teaches Esperanto at Start of Peripatetic Career

Esperanto: It's all the rage!

The Salt Lake Herald devoted an entire column to Esperanto in its October 8, 1906 edition,[1] noting that the language “is all the rage just now with linguists and students of ethnology the world over.” I’m not sure why it would be the rage with students of ethnology[2] (or even that it were), though it certainly garnered a lot of interest among linguists and other sorts of language experts. Their article cited two professors, with apparently nothing in common but Esperanto. In the early period, Esperanto did have a great deal of popularity among academics.

The article starts by mentioning that, George Wise, a University of Utah professor would be leading a group in the study of Esperanto. After a lengthy description of Esperanto, a sample, and a translation, we get to another professor, George Macloskie of Princeton University.[3] I’ll excerpt that too, since it makes a surprising (and inaccurate) claim.

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Professors Battle over Esperanto and Ido

Me? Create Ido? Be serious!

In 1910, George Macloskie, a professor of biology, made some remarks about Ido to the Washington Herald. More than a month later, Louis Couturat, a professor of mathematics and one of the leading proponents of Ido, responded.

We have the sequel. The earlier part is lost, alas. Louis Couturat wrote a letter to the Washington Herald, which they published on September 26, 1910. In it, he refers to an article that appeared in the August 15th edition. Unfortunately, the scanned copy at the Chronicling America web site is missing three pages. Undoubtably, the interview to which Couturat and Macloskie refer was on one of those pages. (The interview has been found! See the bottom of the post for more details.) The remaining pages have plenty about Esperanto; at the time, the sixth Universala Kongreso was taking place in Washington, D.C. and the D.C. papers gave it a lot of coverage. It would be nice to know what Macloskie said about Ido (beyond attributing its creation to Couturat), but that’s not likely to happen.

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