Women Scientists Start Esperanto Group

Margaret Henderson
Bacteriologist.
Esperantist.

The April 5, 1906 San Francisco Call article on an Esperanto group at the University of California, Berkeley, says more the role of women in science in the early twentieth century than it intends to, and less about the Esperanto group than I’d prefer. The article tells us that the group included “a number of faculty people and others connected with the university,” but doesn’t give any hint as to how large that number is, or who the other people might be. It also gives short shrift to the accomplishments of one of the women involved.

The article also makes a whopper of an error, which I am leaving in place. Once, I’d call it a typographical error, and just quietly replace it, but as it occurs twice, it’s clear that it was the author’s intention, and so I’ll side with the writer for the Call, even though he or she is completely wrong. You’ll see.

The article is dwarfed by the picture of Margaret Henderson, which fills in between the headline and the text of the article. I wish they had had an image of Alice Robertson, since I was not able to find any images of her. She is somewhat overshadowed by a woman with nearly the same name, Alice Mary Robertson, who was born somewhat before our Esperantist and managed to outlive her. Alice Mary Robertson was the second woman to hold a seat in Congress (there are plenty of pictures of her). I’ll get to our Esperantist soon.

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The Advantage of Esperanto — Proved by Science!

Kiel oni diras "human study protocol"

For all the snark, that’s actually true.[1] You can learn Esperanto more quickly than you can learn any natural language, in part because natural languages tend to all sorts of difficulties and irregularities. It’s bad engineering, that’s what it is! I’d like to say that no one would plan for a language to have irregular verbs, but the desire of conlangers[2] to complicate matters is endless.

Esperanto is free of the irregularities found in English, or for that matter Danish. Wikipedia notes that Danish has “many nouns with irregular plurals.”[3] Oh boy. While my usual (snarky) comment on Esperanto grammar involves the present-tense forms of the “to be” verb,[4] here I’ll discuss the plural: Esperanto plurals are formed by adding the letter j to the end of the word (Esperanto j is akin to the English y and forms a dipthong).

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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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