Words on Thinking about Wordle

Turns out there’s some flex in this number

An Atlantic article on Wordle, everyone’s current word obsession (except mine) reminded me of a conversation I had about 40 years ago. I think it was late 1981 (as opposed to early 1982) when a friend found that the average adult English speaker knew about 20,000 words. That number struck him as way too high. How could he possibly know 20,00 words?[1] I, on the other hand, totally believed this. Even then, still in my teens, I knew so many words that you just couldn’t fit into everyday conversation, no
matter how hard you tried.[2] The problem is really knowing how many words you know. While everyone else I know has been obsessing over Wordle,[3] I’ve been playing the NYT’s Spelling Bee game, where you make words from a set of seven letters, with one letter needing to be in every word. I’m always amazed at the words I miss. In one recent game, I failed to play the word “ninth.”[4] But let’s get back to my friend’s dorm room in 1981.

I miss the simplest
words in these.
(Not today's either.)

I realized there was a way we could test this. His desk dictionary [5] promised 250,000 entries. I am rarely the most mathematically inclined person in the room[6], and in this situation I was most definitely not the most mathematically inclined person in the room, but I realized that we could come up with a random sample of words, test each other’s knowledge, and then do the math. I do not remember how many words we settled on or whether it would be a statistical sample, but let’s say it was twenty-five each.

We set it up like this: We took turns as Questioner and Responder. The questioner would open the book at random and that’s where his choice ended. The other one would specify a column (out of the four) and a word, counting either from the top or the bottom. (so, third column, fifth from the bottom.) We figured this would stop the questioner from choosing the most obscure word on the page. [7]

Just in case you haven’t
seen one of these recently (though
this is a hardback).

In one round, I simply said, “You know this one, you get the point.” He asked for the word anyway. “Jockstrap.”[8] He confirmed that he knew what that was. Through the game there were plenty of words that he did know and plenty that he didn’t. And the same was true for me. When we did the math.[9] He averaged out to 20,000 words. I had done slightly better. This was no shock. I suspect forty years on, he has learned words the meanings of which are obscure to me, but I suspect in the aggregate I still know more words. Not bragging.[10]

See, I have played.

That brings me back to Wordle and Spelling Bee. Neither of these games require a particularly large vocabulary. I keep finding that words I think perfectly acceptable aren’t listed (presumably because they’re considered obscure), yet one Spelling Bee had épée (though without the accents) on its word list. I was a little irked because even though the word shows up in English-language dictionaries,[11] it’s clearly a French word.[12] In all these games, it’s not so much a question of how big your vocabulary is, it’s how well you can access it. Now I just need a word that uses all seven letters in today’s Spelling Bee.[13]

---

1. Spoiler alert: he did, and has certainly learned words since that hadn’t been coined in 1981.  ↩

2. Of course I tried.  ↩

3. I’ve played it and keep meaning to go back to it.  ↩

4. An obscure word like that? Who can blame me?  ↩

5. If memory serves, he had the paperback edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, if memory plays false, something else.  ↩

6. Often the least.  ↩

7. You don’t know what “squamous” means?  ↩

8. I don’t need to define this, do I? I'm not providing an illustration either.  ↩

9. By which I mean he did, but we were in his room and I probably didn’t have my calculator with me.  ↩

10. Okay, totally bragging. Can’t do math, but at least I do words. That said, after taking the picture of a dictionary spread, I looked at the third word from the bottom of the second column. Totally obscure to me.  ↩

11. Webster’s Ninth Collegiate has it, complete with acute accents.  ↩

12. In one puzzled with a center M, I was peeved that neither “milt” nor “muntin” were permitted.  ↩

13. No hints. Early on, I stumbled on a tweet where someone had posted the whole list. I stopped playing that one.  ↩

---

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.

---

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

Nay to Née

Né? Not for me!

I tend to be fairly conservative in language, preferring the tried-and-true to the innovative, but there is one point where I have to draw the line. There may have been an era in which the use of the French word née didn’t come off as affected or pretentious. We are no longer in that era.

Worse yet, the only times I ever see it, it’s been misused. There are multiple forms. In French there are times in which you would write not only né and née, but also •nés* and nées. It’s just the French word for “born” (that is, the past participle of the verb naître). As a convention in English, it’s acquired the meaning of “born under the name of,” and it’s typically used to indicate that some man is performing under a name other than that with which he was born.

---

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.

---

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

Max Nordau and the Breakdown of Esperanto

Max Nordau
(about 1895)
No fan of Esperanto

Detractors of Esperanto have claimed almost from the beginning that were the language adopted across the world, it would splinter into countless mutually unintelligible dialects, the way that English really hasn’t. Yes, the vulgar[1] Latin of the Roman Empire did split into a variety of languages, but there were some special circumstances and a whole lot of time applied there.

Time alone probably isn’t enough. Some years ago, when I was getting my bachelors degree, one class had a single lecture (out of a survey course) on glottochronology, the idea that not only languages change over time, but there’s a a specific speed for such changes. To quote Wikipedia, “any replacements happen in a way analogical to that in radioactive decay in constant percentages per time elapsed.” Then I went to my advanced Old English seminar, where we had a jolly laugh over the idea. (Wikipedia does describe glottochronology as “controversial,” notes attempts to disprove its mathematics, and says that it “has been rejected by many linguists.”)

---

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.

---

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

A Linguistic Hodgepodge — Either Esperanto or English

Or, as we now say, "hodgepodge."

Reading the newspapers of a century ago is a great way to prepare yourself to rebut the current detractors of Esperanto, because, yes, their arguments are that old. Unfortunately, even though their arguments were rebutted a century ago (yes, even the “English is destined to become the world’s language”), the same arguments still manage to convince people. When you’re an American in a foreign hotel dealing with the clerk’s substandard English, you blame the poor clerk and not the situation that made the clerk expend time in learning a fairly difficult language.

But one of the oddest criticism is that it’s made up out of a bunch of languages, as if some other languages were some sort of seamless whole, sprung from the hearts of its speakers. There’s a graphic going about Facebook that states that English knocks down other languages in dark alleys and rifles their pockets for loose grammar. Vocabulary. English pillages vocabulary, not grammar. But we’re not alone.

---

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.

---

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

Esperanto, Diplomacy, and Duplicity

Increasing need. Increasing resistance

In February 1922, Frederick J. Haskin was back on the topic of Esperanto. He had previously written about Esperanto in 1911. Eleven years later, it was still something for which he saw reason to devote an entire column.[1] As before, his column in the February 10, 1922, Yorkville Enquirer (and wherever else it may have landed) is too long to quote in full,[2] however, the page can be found here.

Haskins was an independent American journalist who sold his various columns to a variety of newspapers. There’s no Wikipedia page on him,[3] and I thought of providing some brief biographical data in my earlier post, but somehow that ended on the (metaphoric) cutting-room floor. Frederick J. Haskin was born in Missouri on December 13, 1873. He was into journalism, eventually starting his own business, calling it “The Information Bureau.” Haskin’s books include The American Government, Answers to Questions, How Other People Get Ahead, The Immigrant: An Asset and a Liability and Presidents and their Wives. According to a catalog record on the HathiTrust website, he died in 1944.[4]

---

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.

---

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

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).

---

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.

---

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

Oscar Browning, Esperanto, and Homosexuality

La unua geja Esperantisto?

The Wikipedia entry on Oscar Browning mentions Virginia Woolf (Mr. Browning is mentioned, unfavorably, in her work) but not Esperanto. This omission should not stand. Further, there is no entry in the Esperanto Wikipedia on Browning, even though there is ample evidence that he deserves an entry there.[1]

Browning was a Victorian-era educator (which lead to Woolf disfavoring him[2]) associated with Cambridge University. The 1907 Universala Kongreso was at Cambridge, and the history shows that Oscar Browning took part in it. In 1905, he had likely just recently taken up an interest in Esperanto, but that was enough for him to give a lecture on the subject. One of the nice aspects of lecturing about Esperanto in 1905 is that, unless Dr. Zamenhof were in the audience, you likely knew more about it than anyone else in the room.

---

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.

---

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

Esperantists — The Kaiser’s Fools

Professor Albert Schinz
Thought Esperanto
a German plot

So claimed a letter in the New York Sun on December 2, 1916. The Germans had been putting out war dispatches in Esperanto, which some Esperantists viewed as a real success for Esperanto. Albert Schinz, of Northampton, Massachusetts didn’t see it that way.

Just as in 1908, when Esperantists felt that the use of Esperanto by Moresnet would taint Esperanto with regional politics, Professor Schinz felt that the Germans were propagandizing the Esperanto movement. Yes, “Professor Schinz.” It took a small amount of work to determine that Albert Schinz was a professor of French at Smith College when he wrote the letter. He was a fairly prolific scholar with many books and articles to his credit.

If it not clear if he was an Esperantist, however, he does note that he knew Esperantists, and he wrote an article in the January 1906 Atlantic Monthly describing and sympathetic of Esperanto. In the Atlantic article, he states that he is not an Esperantist, yet did say he managed to write a short letter to De Beaufront after an hour of study. Yet, in the December 1916 Amerika Esperantist, there’s a short article on Professor Schinz’s letter, noting that Schinz is responding to a letter by Creston Coigne, which had appeared in the November 25 Sun.[1] The Esperantists at this point, seem to have no idea who the man is, referring to him as "one Albert Schinz."

---

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.

---

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

Shakespeare Didn’t Invent “Gossip”

Professional word coiner.
The plays were a sideline.

A tweet popped up on my twitter feed today:

Shakespeare invented over 2,000 commonly used words, such as “amazement,” “luggage,” “gossip,” “bump,” and “eyeball.”

As always, points for use of the serial comma. Demerits for everything else. My first complaint is the use of the word “invented.” Shakespeare didn’t invent any words. Not a one. Not two thousand, but zero. Zilch. The only people who actually “invent” words are the creators of artificial languages, and even then, you might want to restrict it to those who create a priori languages. After all, Ludovic Zamenhof didn’t so much invent the Esperanto word for “bread,” pano, as adapt it from the French pain, while when Edward Powell Foster constructed Ro, his word polab indicates that it’s a food item, and so on.[1]

Let’s modify the claim, and suggest that Shakespeare coined these various words. Maybe. I argue not. Many words exist in spoken form before someone writes them down. A classic example of this is the word gay in the sense of “homosexual.” Other evidence makes it clear that the sense had become established before its first recorded use in the 1938 Bringing Up Baby. The Internet Movie Database states that Cary Grant’s line was an ad lib, but you wouldn’t make a claim that Cary Grant invented “gay.”[2]

---

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.

---

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

Esperanto and the Italian Subversives

Similar, but not Esperanto.

I don’t know what surprises me more: that there was an Esperanto group just for Italian speakers in New York, or that there was an Italian-Language newspaper in Vermont. It just doesn’t strike me as a place with a large Italian population. But they had the Cronaca sovversiva. Clearly with a name like “Subversive Chronicle,” this was a newspaper of the Italian anarchists of the early twentieth century. Sort of the thing you’d expect to see Sacco and Vanzetti reading.[1] The Library of Congress notes that the place of publication varied in its run from 1903 to 1920. No doubt when Lynn, Massachusetts became too hot for an anarchist publication, the editor packed off to Vermont.

We’ve have several threads here, weaving through the (unlikely) location of Barre, Vermont. Early on, Esperanto was picked up by the labor movement and to a degree it’s still there. The major Esperanto dictionary, Plena Ilustrita Vortaro (Complete Illustrated Dictionary) is published by SAT, the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda, the World Non-National Association. They’re not just a dictionary publisher; their real goal is just what their name implies. Then there was the thought that in the near future Esperanto would indeed be the common tongue. So if you were an immigrant, why not learn Esperanto? And, of course, with the large immigrant Italian population of New York, why not give Esperanto classes in Italian?

---

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.

---

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

Hyperpolyglots, Language, and Hype

How about a menu?
Can you read one?

I’ve always felt that stories of hyperpolyglots are more hype than polyglot. There have been many such stories over the years, including early Esperanto speaker Winifred Sackville Stoner Jr., and in all of these cases there seems to be a lack of independent documentation. In the case of the younger Winifred Stoner, our source for her talents is the elder Winifred Stoner, who could not be relied upon for accurate information about her own parentage.[1]

So when io9 did an article on Timothy Doner, my skepticism kicked into high gear. The article, which includes a YouTube video of Doner demonstrating his skills, was prompted by a recent interview he did with the Harvard Crimson. He did the video at the age of 16, and it has given him a bit of fame. I’m sure that there are people who speak many languages, simply from extrapolating from my own abilities, still, I meet extreme claims with skepticism.

---

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.

---

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

Doing Duolingo

This is Duo. He nags.
(And is © Duolingo)

I’ve been lax on writing about studying Hebrew lately. Partly because I haven’t though of anything interesting to say about it, but mostly because the language at which I’m a good deal more practiced has captured my attention again. Le français est dans mon coeur.

Sorry Hebrew, but French remains my first, if no longer my best foreign language.[1] For foreign languages, it’s certainly my first love.[2] While I haven’t given up on studying Hebrew in Rosetta Stone, I’m brushing up on my French with Duolingo. If I worked for, or owned stock in, Rosetta Stone, Duolingo would worry me. Correction: Duolingo would scare the fuck out of me if I had money in Rosetta Stone.[3]

Hey, Duolingo, Rosetta Stone never nags me! Good job! Duolingo e-mails me and send status messages on my iPad to remind me that I haven’t studied my French that day. Oui, maman, je le ferai. Duolingo does have the advantage of getting me at a much higher level, so the exercises I’m doing in Duolingo are, for the most part, refresher. I started studying French at twelve and have kept on with it, more or less, over the last forty years.[4] I’ve studied some Hebrew, but forget saying anything complex in it.[5]

---

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.

---

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

A Charming Flirt

Are you just going to flirt,
or do you plan to get serious?

William Alexander’s Flirting with French is a charming book, though perhaps in the spirit of things, one should say, “ce livre, il a beaucoup de charme”[1] In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that while my flirting has not been as hardcore as Mr. Alexander’s, it seems to be of more faithful duration.

Like Mr. Alexander, I am a man in his 50s (I’m a little younger), I have worked in IT, and I took French in high school. Unlike Mr. Alexander, I didn’t struggle with French then or at any subsequent point.[2] Although my French is sufficiently unpracticed to fall shy of where I’d like it to be (a subject I’ll return to later),[3] my command of French is beyond that which Mr. Alexander claims in his book. Did I mention that the book is charming?

There are two narratives operating in this book. One clearly deserves the title Flirting with French. In it a middle-aged man embarks on a year-long quest to conquer the French language. Honestly, whether he learns a word of French or not is irrelevant: we’re there for the journey, not the destination. The parallel text might be called Dancing with Disaster, as Mr. Alexander wrote this while being treated for a serious heart condition, nevertheless doing things that took him far from his cardiologist. In one section of the book, he’s off for an intensive study course in Provence while under treatment for a potentially fatal problem. I think that would leave me too frightened to cope with irregular verbs.

---

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.

---

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

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.

---

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.

---

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

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.

---

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.

---

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

Failing at Language? Maybe You Chose Wrong

Learn this man's
secret for speaking
a foreign language

William Alexander wrote in the New York Times about the trials of learning a foreign language.

I used to joke that I spoke French like a 3-year-old. Until I met a French 3-year-old and couldn’t hold up my end of the conversation.

I think I’ve put in more hours of learning French than Mr. Alexander (I started in 1974), and while my studies seem to include none of the things he did, I am able to read eighteenth-century French in the original. “Tonight, sweetheart, we’ll be reading Voltaire’s Zadig in French for your bedtime story.” I don’t think I’d hand Adolphe to a 3-year-old (I think it’s standard for high schoolers in France though).

But even with my abilities to read eighteenth-century novels, Le Monde, and Têtu in French, I know that my abilities to speak are somewhat more limited. I. Speak. French. Much. More. Slowly. Than. I. Speak. English. I have actually had casual conversation in French. Some years ago, I was in D.C. and was asked a question in very bad English by a French woman who was at the museums. She had trouble understanding my English, so we both switched to French.

---

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.

---

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

The Language They're Studying in New York

This piece by "R.L.H." that appeared in the New-York Tribune on July 4, 1913, starts off poking fun at universal languages (and seems to add a few whose names are the writer’s own creation to some real ones), but the real subject matter seems to be what a polyglot place New York had become in 1913. In other words, it is a cry of “why are all these foreigners speaking their foreign tongues in our fair city?”

In this, the writer gets to not only mock the latest contestant in the universal language rally, but also get to express contemporary anxieties about immigrant populations. Ro, the language mentioned in this piece seems to have never been a serious contender as an international language. There does not seem to have been any Ro clubs, magazines, or conventions.

---

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.

---

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

Was the Baby’s First Word “Zamenhof”?

Special rates if you ask
in Esperanto?

People who don’t speak Esperanto are often amazed to find that there are birth speakers of Esperanto. The phrase for this in Esperanto is denaskaj esperantistoj, “esperantists by birth.” What typically happens is that a couple meets through the Esperanto movement, often with separate native tongues, and they use Esperanto as a household language, bringing up their children in this language as well.

On July 3, 1912, the Beckenridge News of Cloverport, Kentucky, published a short article on one such child. They didn’t name the child, so I set off to see if I could find any record of this, in order to flesh out the short item. Despite the tempting biographical details “one of the leaders in America of the so called universal language” and “is fifty-eight years old,” I hit a stone wall doing my research. This was a shame, because this child may have been the earliest denaska esperantisto born in the United States. But if he were such a leader, why couldn’t I find him in the Esperanto magazines of the era?

---

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.

---

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

Welcome to Usono

Nia Usonestro
(from Wikipedia Commons)

It’s funny to think of a New York paper devoting this much space to a minor point of Esperanto usage, but on June 30, 1907, the New York Sun did exactly that with an article on how the new name for the country in Esperanto was Usono.

Despite the popularity the word had achieved, the older usage, “Amerika” was still retained in the principal magazine of the Esperanto movement in the United States, the Amerika Esperantisto, which would continue under that name at least until the 1930s. It finally stopped publication in the 1950s.

Happily, the article is not too long to quote in full (I’m a quick typist). The article appeared in the New York Sun on June 30, 1907. While it was a new coinage in Esperanto, in 1907, a lot of Esperanto was new. The language had vastly developed since 1887. The use of the word Usono dates back to 1905, and it seems it had quickly become established in Esperanto.

---

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.

---

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

Newspaper Misses the Whole Point of Esperanto

Against Esperanto?
How can you be
against Esperanto?

The Fulton County News of McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania seems to have missed the entire point of Esperanto in a June 29, 1911 piece titled “Against Esperanto.” One of the general requirements of suggested for an international language in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was that the language should be more easily learnt than any of the national languages. This rules Klingon right out.

But the Fulton County News made the claim that

time is value, and the time employed by an English-speaking person in learning Esperanto might be better employed in learning French or German or both.

The effort needed to learn Esperanto is pretty minimal, particularly when you compare it to German, a language with declensions, conjugations, and a surprising number of plural forms. A year’s study of German is pretty minimal. A year of French is somewhat better, but will still leave you fairly stranded in Paris. You could master Esperanto in a year.

---

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.

---

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