If We Don't Get the Golfers, We're Doomed!

Do you speak Golf?

A short item in the June 2, 1900 Evening Star of Washington D.C. points to a real problem for Esperanto, which had been released twelve years prior. You weren't going to nab the people playing games. It seems that what the Star is suggesting is that golf and whist terminology had become picked up as general expressions used by people who weren't playing either game.

Certainly Zamenhof would would have been happy to see Esperantists playing golf or whist, conversing in the language as they did so (is conversation in Esperanto or any other language permissible during a golf match?), although "visto" didn't become an official part of the language until 1909, and "golfo," means "gulf," though PIV, the large Esperanto dictionary also uses the word to mean the sport. (By the rules of Esperanto this is completely wrong, as the language is supposed to be free of homophones. The name of the game has nothing to do with the word "gulf," so even "golfludo" is incorrect, since that would mean "game of gulf.")

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