Veltlang at the Esperanto Meeting

The Veltlang Alphabet
Not sure if you can use it to write Esperanto

Veltlang clearly got more press than it deserved. Chronicling America has thirteen articles on it, ranging from its introduction in May 1910 through 1913 (when journalists seemed to tire of it). Its creator, Frederick Braendle, was a translator for the Pension Office (and so his designation of “Professor” was undoubtably self-conferred), who spoke sixteen languages. For the world, he gave English, slightly respelled with a new alphabet.

Those thirteen article are a bit too much coverage because Braendle’s only publication on Veltlang is a twelve-page pamphlet which gives little detail about the language itself (which, once again, is really English), and goes into greater detail of the somewhat mystical implications that Braendle felt his language had.

There does seem to have been a language, since he told the press the he used it in correspondence with friends. However, his book World-English, A New World Language, Veltlang, with English Words and English Grammar, Subject to the limitations of the phonetic writing of Veltlang, together with a simple phonetic world-alphabet, Seuastikon is his only book. (This title brings to mind the long titles of eighteenth-century novels, which are typically chopped down in modern editions.)

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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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Mr. Baker’s Brochure and An Esperantist Responds

Why would Arthur Baker ask
for stamps and then just
mail them back?

On December 5, 1910, the Los Angeles Herald ran a letter from O. H. Mayer, a prominent Idoist, promoting a brochure about Ido, must as Arthur Baker had been promoting a brochure on Esperanto. This brought two responses from readers of the Herald, one telling us what happened when he wrote to Arthur Baker for the free Esperanto brochure, and the other attempting to rebut the claims made by O. H. Mayer.

Baker was in Esperanto for the cash, and seemed resentful of competition from other Esperantist concerns.[1] For him, the whole point of the brochure Elements of Esperanto was to get people to buy his book, The American Esperanto Book, subscribe to his magazine, Amerika Esperantisto, or both. The proffered free brochure (available for stamps for reply) was a sixteen-pages long, and largely drawn from Zamenhof’s Unua Libro. Today it can be read without having to send stamps to anyone, since Google Books has made a copy of Elements of Esperanto readily available. Elements of Esperanto concludes with an advertisement for The American Esperanto Book.

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Early Obituary for Volapük

It's all just memorization,
and by now you've probably
memorized this article anyway.

It was probably premature to declare Volapük dead in 1888. Volapük never had annual congresses, but there would be another (the last one) in 1889. Nor is it clear (to me) who it is declaring that “the Volapuk craze seems to have run its course and died,” as I can find no other references to its author, C. H. De Ligne. The piece originally appear ed in the Chicago News, and was reprinted in the Daily Yellowstone Journal on October 5, 1888.

The “Volapük craze,” as De Ligne put it, seems to have been at its height in 1888, although schisms were forming. The Phillipsburg Herald (Phillipsburg, Kansas) reported on the same day that “Spelin in the rival universal language to Volapuk.” With rivals forming, maybe De Ligne felt that the downfall of Volapük was already in the cards.

He (my assumption) seems to be wrong about several things, but I’ll let De Ligne have his say first:

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An Egalitarian Volpük

Charles Ezra Sprague

Charles Sprague, the chief Volapükist in the United States[1] was clearly delighted with one decision of the 1887 Volapük congress in Munich: they dropped a pronoun, specifically, the second person formal. From Sprague’s report, most people were content with the second person in singular and plural forms.

I've glanced at other Volpük materials by Sprague from the same time period. While an advocate for Volapük, he was certainly unsparing in his criticism. By 1889, he was questioning Schleyer's use of umlauts (pointing out, for example, that even Germans didn't make a distinction between i and ü). Thus, without the umlaut, the name of the language would be pronounced the same if it were named "Volapik." Sprague would later offer the postmortem for Volapük in the American press.

The article ran in something called the Home Journal, and then reprinted in the Fort Worth Daily Gazette on October 5, 1887. They liked it so much that they used it two days later in the Fort Worth Weekly Gazette of October 7, 1888.

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Sister Hildegard’s Language

Saint Hildegard says not to write
anything nasty with her letters.

Happy St. Hildegard’s Day!

Today is the feast day of St. Hildegard of Bingen, who is probably the only saint to have created a language. She did other things to, but among those who study constructed languages, her “Lingua Ignota” has long held pride of place as the earliest recorded artificial language. She died on September 17, 1179. I’m not certain if that’s been adjusted for calendar changes, but about 853 years ago today.[1]

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Why Volapük Failed

It hasn't failed until everyone gives up!

The post-mortem for Volapük was delivered in the pages of the Evening Times[1] of Washington, D.C. on September 6, 1902, by none other than a man described as the “Chief Volpukian in the United States.“ By that time, there wen’t all that many Volapük speakers to be chief of, but that was the lot of Charles E. Sprague, the author of the Hand-Book of Volapuk.

Wikipedia has a interesting fact on Mr. Sprague that puts me literally one handshake away. At the 1986 World Science Fiction Convention in Atlanta, George, I got to meet the great science fiction writer, L. Sprague de Camp. I just happened to be at hand for the question, “excuse me, young man, do you know where the elevators are?”[2] Mr. Sprague was Mr. de Camp’s maternal grandfather.

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More Esperanto Theater

Too late to get tickets, of course.

Ivy Kellerman Reed’s translation of As You Like It (Kiel Plaĉas al Vi) was the first, but not the last time a play in Esperanto was presented in the Washington, D. C. area. While I cannot say this with any great authority, it seems that most (if not all) Universalaj Kongresoj include theatrical performances (among other matters), it’s probably a rarity for a play in Esperanto to be produced outside a Kongreso, although there are some records of plays produced by local Esperanto groups.

The Washington Times reported on September 4, 1912 that a group of high school students from the Washington High School Esperanto Club would be mounting a production of a play titled Ĝis La Revido[1] in Annapolis, Maryland. There is no subsequent review of this play, so we do not know how the students acquitted themselves.

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Doctor Praises Esperanto Congress

H.W. Yemans, another
doctor in the Esperanto
movement

During the build-up to the 1910 Universala Kongreso, its organizers kept saying that it was going to be the largest ever, although when it actually occurred, it was the smallest yet, and the only smaller was a hastily planned congress at a great remove from most Esperanto speakers and held during a war.[1] The high hopes that the Esperanto movement had for the 1910 congress did not bear fruit. Yet in the aftermath, Dr. H. W. Yemans it touting that it was the largest ever held in the United States. Well, there’s that.

The Esperanto movement was probably at its height in the United States during this period, and yet it wasn’t enough. Though the piece was titled “Says Esperanto Is Coming Talk” (“an up-and-coming language”), its day hasn’t arrived yet. In 1910, there were more than 2,300 subscribers to Amerika Esperantisto. The 2013 membership directory of Esperanto-USA has about 500 members in it.[2] On the other hand, a Facebook search for “Esperanto members who live in the United States” returns “more than 1,000 people.”[3] Esperanto might be doing well in the United States, but it’s hard to tell. It, alas, was never the “coming talk” that the Yale Expositor said it was on September 2, 1910.

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Volapük Conferences in the US — Their Short History

Let the Volapük speakers come!

Many of the places that there the sites of early successes of Esperanto in the first decade of the twentieth century were sites of successes of Volpük in the late nineteenth. Just as the first Esperanto conference in the United States was held at Chautauqua, New York, under the auspices of the Chautauqua Institution,[1] Volapük conference was held there as well.

Disclosure: I am not at all versed in Volapük. I have looked at it (as I have several other planned languages) and it was not to my taste. Nor have I (until recently) looked much into its history, so all I know about it is what I’ve read in the papers (the papers being those of a century ago that have been scanned and indexed on the web). However, I do find Volapük of historical interest, since it had a much more rapid rise than Esperanto (or any other planned language). It also flamed out just as fast.

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Monoglott — A Language of One?

"More" but not "much"

I have previously written about some early Nebraska Esperanto speakers, as I stumbled on articles about a mother and daughter who were both Esperantists, and there was an active community of Esperanto speakers in Nebraska in the early twentieth century. But that doesn’t mean that everybody in Nebraska was a fan of Esperanto.

D. C. John seems to have written quite a few letters to the editor of the Omaha Daily Bee in the mid 1910s. He wrote on a number of subjects, but in a pair of letters published on August 17 and 27, 1915, proposed a competitor to Esperanto. I’m not exactly sure about the identity of D. C. John. One letter does refer to D. C. John as a male, and describes him as “the learned doctor,” so the letter writer might have known more than we do. Further, D. C. John’s wife later became the head of the Douglas County Woman’s Christian Temperance Union chapter.[1] D. C. John seems to have stopped writing letters to the editor about the same time that his wife became busier with the WCTU. D. C. John seems to have been involved in the Anti-Saloon League. Most of the articles I’ve found on the Johns are about the temperance movement.

D. C. John’s interest in this matter seems to have been sparked by an August 2, 1915 letter by Charles P. Lang promoting Esperanto. Mr. Lang had done this before. On April 22, 1915, he cited the war bulletins that were being in Esperanto. Mr. Lang’s August 2nd letter brought forth an amplification from D. C. Corios, a native of Yucatan, living in Omaha on the 6th. And then, finally, D. C. John weighed in on August 11, 1915.

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Clarison, an International Language

Do you speak Clarison?

It’s hard to imagine just how many candidates there have been for an international language over the years. In her wonderful book, In the Land of Invented Languages, Arika Okrent has a select list of planned languages. She noted that a complete list would be full “boring” redundant names (she asks “how many variations on ‘Lingua International’ do you need to get the picture?”). Others were omitted because the actual authorship wasn’t clear. This may be why she doesn’t list “Clarison,” which was the subject of an article in the Salt Lake Herald on August 20, 1898.

The Herald says that it got its information from “the New York Press.” I have not found a newspaper of that name, but there were plenty of New York newspapers. Nor have I found much detail over who created Clarison. A notice of the book Clarison appeared in the Times (London) on July 30, 1898, so I’m guessing the book was probably published on England. Later that year, Current Literature reprinted a four-page description of the language from the London Year Book. I have been unable to find any record in a library of Clarison.

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The Esperanto News in German

It's lovely, though I find it tough to read

In the early twentieth century, there were several newspapers in a variety of languages other than English. The Chronicling America site at the Library of Congress has nearly as many German-language newspapers as ones in Spanish. The Baltimore newspaper Der Deutsche Correspondent published many articles on planned languages, and seem to be the first newspaper in the United States to mention Esperanto (in 1887, mere weeks after Esperanto was introduced).

Like many other newspapers, they reported on the various Esperanto congresses, often at length. I’ve skipped over those articles for two reasons:

• My German is very weak. I studied it for a year, and really don’t use it.
• Der Deutsche Correspondent was typeset in Fraktur, and it’s difficult for me to read.

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Ido and Esperanto Congress

Not an Ido speaker to be found.

On August 14, 1910, the Washington Herald had several articles on Esperanto, and perhaps to balance all that off, also included one on Ido. Their placement of the article couldn’t have been worse. It occupies almost the entire remainder of the three columns beneath a set photos of prominent members of Esperanto congress, Gabriel Chavet, Dr. H. W. Yemors, Edwin C. Reed, Dr. Ivy Kellerman Reed, and Captain Josefo Perogordo. Not an Idoist in the bunch.

Oddly enough, though the article makes the claim that Ido is makes improvements to Esperanto, the article starts by talking about what a success Esperanto was at fostering communication between people of differing native languages. But despite the “wonderful progress” of Esperanto, the writer of the article, Lindsay S.Perkins, decided to devote a chunk of the article to Ido.

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Esperantists Arrive in Washington

Gabriel Chavet
Appreciative tourist

Not all of the European attendees of the 1910 Esperanto Congress travelled on the George Washington (though with twenty-two of them, that might have been the largest crowd, and with the Zamenhofs, the most celebrated). A group of three French Esperantists travelled on the Rijndam, leaving Boulogne-sur-Mer on July 30 and arriving in New York on August 9, slightly ahead of the George Washington group.

The three were Gabriel Chavet (30), Claudius Colas (26), and Georges Warnier (27). All three are listed as “linguists.” All three are listed in Esperanto Wikipedia, while only M. Colas has an entry in the English language Wikipedia. In that same year, under the pseudonym Prof. V. Esperema, Colas published L’Adjuvilo; Langue Auxilaire Internationale, or, “simplified Ido.” As Colas never joined the Ido movement or even left the Esperanto movement, it has been suggested that Adjuvilo was created to sow dissension among the Ido speakers, by suggesting further reforms.[1]

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Another Early Nebraska Esperantist

Alice Howard

In my previous post, I wrote about Abigail Russell, an early Esperanto speaker, living in Nebraska. As I noted, her daughter was also an Esperanto speaker, and apparently as active as her mother in Esperanto and other areas. Alice Howard, née Alice Russell, was very active in Omaha society in the early twentieth century. The Nebraska papers wrote about her and her family ninety-one times, between 1887 and 1915. Her husband was a druggist. The lived in Dundee, Nebraska.

Many of the pieces are short items dealing with the Howard’s social life, such as Alice going to visit her parents or her parents coming to visit her. When they spent the summer of 1901 with relatives in Ord, did Alice and her mother, Abigail, teach the little Howards any Esperanto? Or had Alice done that herself already?

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An Early Nebraska Esperantist

Abigal Russell

It’s not clear when Abigail Russell learned Esperanto. On August 6, 1911 the Omaha Daily Bee said that she had learned Esperanto “even before text books and readers in the language arrived in this country,” which if accurate would mean she had she had learned Esperanto within a year of so of its inception, as Henry Phillips, Jr. had translated and adapted Zamenhof’s pamphlet in 1889, under the name An Attempt at an International Language.[1] The implication seems to be that she learned the language not long after it was introduced.

Mrs. Russell is not listed in The North American Review's first list of American esperantists in July 1907 (nor are any other Nebraska esperantists). By May, 1908, she is listed as the head of the First Nebraska Esperanto Club, as noted in Amerika Esperantisto. (She is not the first Nebraskan to be listed in Amerika Esperantisto. That honor goes to John Springer, of Red Cloud, who had himself listed in the “Fako de Korespondado”[2] section in January 1908.) In the July 1908 issue, she actually has a short piece, “La Ĉielo Lin Benu!”[3]

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Was It 1910 or 1911 for the Esperanto Congress?

What year was that?

As I've noted many times, Washington D.C. hosted the 1910 Universala Kongreso, the World Esperanto Congress, which has the dubious distinction of being the smallest one ever (if you don’t count the Paris 1914 convention, which was cancelled as people were traveling to it, since World War I had broken out). A pair of conflicting articles, on August 5, 1909 in the Washington Times and Washington Herald, do show that Washington D.C. was eager to host the convention, although it’s not clear from the articles what was being proposed.

The bid process currently for a Universala Kongreso ends with a vote of the leaders of the Universala Esperanto-Asocio, and somehow involves the national organization of the host country, and possibly a local group. Nitra, where the 2016 congress will be held, was this year the site of the Somera Esperanta Studado, so presumably a number of Esperantists were able to determine the suitability of the location. There had been a proposal for San Diego, but it seems that was rejected (in part) for being too expensive, a concern that the Esperanto movement had with the prospect of a UK[1] in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century.

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Esperanto’s Savior?

Savior or traitor?

The August 4, 1907 New York Sun had a lengthy piece on Esperanto (almost two columns), and I won’t be quoting it in full here (maybe another time, because it is a valuable early document in the press). Instead, I’m going to focus on just the first six paragraphs.

I don’t believe that everything in the article “Pioneers of Esperanto” is accurate, because already in the first six paragraphs, there are problems. The opening of the article largely focusses not on Ludovik Zamehhof and the creation of Esperanto, but instead on Marquis Louis de Beaufront, the early Esperanto advocate, who soon after this article was published would introduce his “revised Esperanto” project, Ido.

The Sun describes de Beaufront as someone who has to be taken in “almost equal regard” as Zamenhof himself. Since the article was published, 107 have gone past, and we can look at de Beaufront somewhat differently. One thing that has become clear was the he was a great self-promoter and self-mythologizer.

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A Vermont Esperantist

S-ro. Pellett je 1920

The Vermont Phœnix of Brattleboro, Vermont, ran two articles on Esperanto (one short, one long) in their August 4, 1916 edition. Both dealt with a Battleboro resident’s trip to the ninth congress of the American Association of North America. Mr. Pellett clearly had an in at the Phœnix, as not only did they write about his travels, but wrote a longer piece about the current state of Esperanto and highlighting some of the prominent figures in the Esperanto movement in the United States. (The Pellett family seems to have been prominent in Brattleboro.)

It’s a small city newspaper, not the New York Sun or the Washington Herald, but it’s clear that in 1916, John C. Pellett’s local paper was quite willing to devote a number column inches to Esperanto.

I've dumped most of my comments into the footnotes this time.

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