Esperanto in 1909 Florida

Mr. Pryor played to win

Nellie Jerauld went unmentioned in the article in in the February 17, 1909 Pensacola Journal, but it probably wasn’t necessary to mention her, since her interest in Esperanto was probably well known to her neighbors in the Choctawhatchee Bay area of Florida, and her home got mentioned in the article. She was actually a bit of a latecomer to Esperanto, since the first indication of her Esperanto activity dates to the end of 1908, but by early 1908 there was a group in Pensacola, the “Unufojio Esperanto Societo de Floridio,” (at least what’s what the Journal put into print)[1] although Pensacola might have been a bit far for Mrs. Jerauld.[2]

Mrs. Jerauld named her home “Evoluta.” The Pensacola Journal noted in 1908 that “all of the planning and most of the work for the first two years was done by Mrs. Jerauld and her two daughters.” (There were two sons too, but they seem to have had other concerns.) From accounts in the newspapers, Evoluta seems to have been a combination of farm, boarding house, and arts center. And it was a place for Esperanto.

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The Voice of Zamenhof

Learn Esperanto the modern way!

One of the problems with learning a language by book or correspondence course is that you can’t be exactly certain if you’re pronouncing it correctly. Obviously in our day there are a number of work-arounds for this (that involve using computers instead of books). For languages that died out before the advent of sound recording, an exact idea of how they sounded is lost. The early Esperanto learners had this problem of not being able to turn to a nearby Esperanto speaker and find if they were pronouncing the language properly. A group of enterprising Canadian Esperantists sometime before January 29, 1904 came up with an ingenious solution to this problem. They found a way to ask an expert.

The article in the New-York Tribune reprints an article from the London Daily Chronicle, though no date is given for that. Further, the article does not indicate how the news about the Montreal Esperantists got to London. Did they get it from a Canadian newspaper? Did they get it from the Esperanto press (perhaps the British Esperantist)?

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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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