Esperanto at Twenty, No Matter What the Sun Says

Esperanto was a youthful twenty.

The first American Esperanto conference wouldn’t take place until July 1908, but in 1907 the Chautauqua Institute in Chautauqua, New York was already holding Esperanto events and classes (no doubt this was one reason why the American Esperantists chose it as the location for their first conference). The New York Sun is short on the particulars of what drew Henry Forman to Chautauqua to make remarks on Esperanto (or the specific date of these remarks). They reported on this on August 2, 1907.

At the time, George Harvey, the publisher of the North American Review had been promoting the idea of an American Esperanto society for several months. It can’t be dated from the publication of the Unua Libro, since that happened in 1887, twenty years prior. The title of the piece is counts from the formation of the first Esperanto society (thirteen years prior).

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Is this Blog Legal?

On the one hand:
When I signed up for the OS X 10.10 public beta, I had to a agree to a nondisclosure statement. Apple does tell you that you aren't supposed to blog about it.

On the other hand:
On the other hand, they've stated that they have no objection to developers and the like discussing matters that they've made public.

If you look on Twitter for the hashtags #YosemiteBeta, you find all sorts of posts on it. Like this one:

It does, by the way.

So, I guess I'll keep posting my observations, keeping it within some kind of limit. Hey, Apple Computer, I'm trying to keep on the good side of the NDA.

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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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Insisted on Trial after Sodomy Charge

Was Mr. Farrell naughty too?

In the midst of reading old newspapers today, my attention was drawn to the case of Margaret Delf, who was (repeatedly) charged with prostitution and brothel keeping in 1884 St. Paul. The search term that lead me to Margaret was “sodomy,” which was not one of the things she was charged with, but was the charge for the case described immediately after hers.

Unlike Ms. Delf, for whom this was to be the last reference in the St. Paul Daily Globe, there is a follow-up to the second story. I’ll give it all here.

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Mrs. Delf's Unsuccessful Profession

Naughty Margaret Delf

I hope that whoever wrote the police court column in the Saint Paul Daily Globe in 1884 went on to bigger and better things. There’s some real style here, so I hope the anonymous journalist gave us some work at book length. It’s really amusing writing, which makes me think I should be dipping into the Saint Paul Daily Globe’s police column more frequently.

I’ve decided do things a little differently, and I’ve scattered a few footnotes into the text. The second item in the column was the one that lead me there, but this one was too good to resist.

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It Pays to Advertise Esperanto

Kara Redaktoro

The New-York Tribune paid $1 for each letter from a child whose letter was selected for the “Our Letter Box” section of their “Little Men & Little Women” page. Only July 10, 1910, they published a letter from Joseph Lepsey, a twelve-year-old Esperantist.

Mr. Lepsey wrote back to the paper (which appeared elsewhere on the page), thanking them for the check and telling them of his plans. The letter appears in both English and Esperanto, one of those rare examples when newspapers published material in Esperanto. Unfortunately, the compositors couldn’t read Esperanto and did not have access to the accented letters. I have corrected their errors.

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