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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Poetess’s Legacy to Universal Language

Eliza Pittsinger. California poet.
Could have benefited
universal language

It is safe to say that Eliza A. Pittsinger, a poet who died in San Francisco in 1908, is among the forgotten poets of California, but at the beginning of the twentieth century, she seems to have been something of a celebrated poet. She was born in about 1820 in West Hampton, Massachusetts,[1] to John and Mary Pittsinger. In 1842, she married one Professor Mayo[2] in Hartford, Connecticut. They separated and later divorced, with Eliza went back to using the name Pittsinger (if she ever used Mayo).

As early as 1862, Pittsinger had moved to San Francisco, where she described her profession as “poetess.” She had certainly established herself as a poet by this time, contributing a poem to the ceremonies for laying the corner stone of the New Pioneer Hall of the Society of California Pioneers, in July 1862. According to the Society of California Pioneers, this building was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Miss Pittsinger, was not a California Pioneer, as the term is reserved for those who settled in California before 1850, at which time she was still in Northampton, although the San Francisco Call described her as such in an death notice of her sister, in May 1907. At the time of Pittsinger’s death, the Call stated that she arrived in California in 1852.

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Esperanto First Appears in the US Press

The first!

I’m always reluctant to cite an article from Der Deutsche Correspondent, the German-langauge newspaper published in Baltimore, Maryland from 1848 until 1918. My German is weak and and I find fraktur[1] difficult to read. But how could I resist the first article to appear in the United States about Esperanto?

It took quite a while for knowledge of Esperanto to filter out of Poland. Dr. Zamenhof could have found a more neglected place than Warsaw from which to publish his pamphlet, but it would have required some work. The slow growth was helpful for Esperanto, compared to the rapid rise and fall of Volapük, which by the time anyone had heard of Esperanto, was already going through its period of reformist schisms. Unlike Esperanto during the Ido conflict, Volapük didn’t fare all that well after the schisms.

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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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Chinese, the Language of the Future

The future is now

I’ve seen recent claims that parents who want their children to succeed in the future should be encouraging them to learn Mandarin, and some schools have offered Mandarin to fairly young children. I am skeptical of this, however, I was not surprised to find that the idea is not new.

China was quite a different place in 1911, when the San Francisco Call published a short article in which the cited a professor[1] who said that Chinese[2] would be “the language of the future.” More than a century has passed, and there are some who still think that Chinese is the language of the future.

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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.

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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.

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Volapük Pronounced Dead on Anniversary of Creator’s Birth

Schleyer

July 18th, 2014 was the 183rd anniversary of the birth of Johann Martin Schleyer, the creator of Volapük. In 1910, the Evening Statesman of Walla Walla, Washington, took this as an opportunity to mark the anniversary and to pronounce his creation dead. Schleyer was still around at that point; he died in August 1912.

It’s not clear how many Volapük speakers were still around in 1909. I doubt even those who forsake it totally forgot it. Wikipeda notes that at its height, it had a million speakers, but in 1900, the total number of active Volapukists was 159. A decade later, who knows?

I wish we could wish a happier birthday to Johann Martin Schleyer, but feel free to raise a glass in a toast to the man who felt that God had revealed to him the tongue that all mankind should learn. And if you can’t make the toast in Volapük, don’t worry. Few can these days.

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Ro On the Go

Ro, it's the latest thing.

The Washington Times duly reported on the progress of the a priori (built from scratch) language Ro in its July 16, 1909 edition, although the reporter didn’t seem to be too convinced. Judging from the article, it does seem that some societies had been formed, although the people quoted in the article seem to all be former Esperantists who became Idists who decided that a philosophical language would be even better.

The reporter notes of of the problems that a variety of international language groups have faced: the newer ones tend to poach on the older ones. The Volapukists became Esperantists (though that time, it didn’t seem that the nascent Esperanto movement sought to poach the Volapük movement, which was already splitting apart). The Idists were recruited from the Esperantists, more heavily from the leadership than from the general body. And it looks like Ro was attracting Ido speakers.

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Esperanto at the World’s Fair

Ici on parle l'Espéranto?

The 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, is known for a number of things, including an early demonstration of sound film.[1] According to an article in the July 5, 1899 Washington Times, is should also be known as one of the early demonstrations of Esperanto.

In 1899, Esperanto had reached the ripe old age of 12. The first Universala Kongreso was still six years away. And while the Times got a lot of facts about Esperanto wrong, the rather long article devoted to it was on the whole positive. Among all the entertainment of the fair, it seemed that some wanted to get some important work done.

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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.

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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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Esperanto: A Last and Desperate Attempt for Volapuk?

"That well-worn fad"

In 1897, The San Francisco Call ran a short article on Esperanto, just about ten years after that language was introduced. The item describes Esperanto as "an improved form of Volapuk." It's funny to see that ideas for international language were already being derided as a "well-worn fad" in 1897.

Although this is one of the earliest articles in the American press on Esperanto, it disagrees with a slightly earlier piece that continued to run in newspapers later. The other piece, originally from the New York World, correctly identified Esperanto as a rival to Volapuk, although it does place Zamenhof in Warsaw, although he was living in Grodno in 1897.

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