The Mysterious A. E. Handley

There might not have
been any takers.

What you can accomplish through research can only go so far and every once in a while, instead of tracking down an early Esperanto speaker, I come up with nothing. Such is the case, unfortunately in the case of A. E. Handley, who lived in Ocala, Florida in 1908.

In 1908, starting on January 28, (Mr.? Mrs.? Ms.?) Handley ran a series of advertisements in the Ocala Evening Star, offering his services in the teaching of French, elementary German and Spanish, and Esperanto. The advertisement ran in the 17 subsequent non-Sunday issues of the paper, from January 28 to February 24, exclusive of the 2nd, 9th, 16th, and 23rd, additionally missing the 19th (a Wednesday). That last one was probably the fault of the newspaper, since the advertisement appears on both pages 5 and 6 of the February 18, 1908 newspaper.

---

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!

Prepare for the Fina Venko — Duolingo Has Esperanto

La strigo parolas esperante!
(Image © Duolingo)

Duolingo, the popular language learning site and app has been promising Esperanto for quite a while (more than a year). It’s probably the language courts that attracted the most attention while still in incubation (although my perception of this may be skewed in that I follow the Esperanto groups where people have been saying “when will Esperanto come to Duolingo?” seemingly forever). If you’ve been waiting to learn Esperanto until Dueling offered it, now’s your chance (unless you’re waiting to do it on iOS, for which there will be a brief wait).

I have to confess that I’ve been delinquent in my own use of Duolingo, despite my initial enthusiasm for the program. I’ve just found that language lessons were getting squeezed out of my schedule these days, despite that I even used Duolingo while traveling. I really need to brush up on my French again.

---

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!

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:

---

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!

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!