Which Miss Fernald Spoke Esperanto?

The press didn't actually review the play/

I don’t usually start these off with questions, although in this case I think I’m safely away from being clickbait[1] It’s a real (and, based on the resources on hand) unanswered question. In Washington, D.C. in 1911, there were two unmarried women names Frances Fernald, one a teacher, the other a clerk at the War Department. Which of these two spoke Esperanto?

At least one of them did. We know this because one Miss Frances Fernald got her name in the papers on February 7, 1911 concerning a play that she and her friends put on at the Washington, D.C. YWCA. The play was in Esperanto, which leads to the question of how many people in the audience of the play understood the play. (I suppose it also raises the question of how many were in attendance at the play, although in the years around 1910, there was a fairly large amount of Esperanto activity in Washington, D.C.)

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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?

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More on Mrs. Hausdorf, an 1883 Legal Case

Yelling insults in the street?

Yesterday, I wrote about an item that appeared in the June 30, 1883 St. Paul Daily Globe. I was more interested in the story of Joseph Carp, who said that his "passions were unlike those of other men." Just to give some flavor to the piece, I noted some of the other people who came in front of the judge that same day.

A friend of mine wondered more about the argument between Mrs. Hausdorf  and Mrs. Reimer. I considered them amusing but ancillary, and didn't follow up on them at all. But I could.

Here's the full account, giving more than I gave yesterday:

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