Esperanto on Street Cars

Somewhat dated, alas.

Oh, were this the reality now, and perhaps it will be again. I’ve been making periodic checks of the number of people who have signed up for Esperanto lessons on Duolingo. As of today (June 28, 2015), it is just past thirty-seven thousand.[1] In a way, it resembles the wave of enthusiasm that happened in the United States from about 1906 through 1912.

In the “Book Chat” column of the June 28, 1906 edition of the New York Observer and Chronicle, that’s exactly the vision brought forth by the writer: “it would not be surprising to hear ‘Esperanto’ conversations on board the street cars.” It would be today. I have the sneaking suspicion that there were more Esperanto speakers in 1915 New York than there are throughout the entire United States in 2015 (I hope I’m wrong).

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A (Partial) History of Same-Sex Marriage

Marriage. Nothing new.

Same-sex couples may now marry in all fifty states, and people are beginning work on histories of the marriage-equality movement.[1] I hope that these histories go back far enough. There is a stark difference between this history of same-sex marriage and the history of same-sex marriage in the United States.

When I was listening the Obergefell hearing, I was not particularly surprised that several justices brought up the question of whether there were historical examples of same-sex marriage. I actually think this line of questioning was profoundly irrelevant. We can find plenty of historical examples, and even contemporary ones, for things that are prohibited by the constitution. I don’t need to go deep into history to find examples of the suppression of freedom of speech. Just as a lack of freedom of speech in other places and times says nothing of our rights, a lack (or even existence) of same-sex marriage in history would say nothing about whether or not it was part of basic human liberty.

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Marriage Equality — At Last!

Let freedom ring!

I’ve been waiting a long time for this! I’ve been arguing in favor of same-sex marriage for more than twenty years. When California authorized domestic partnerships, I saw them as half a loaf (or maybe even less, given the limited rights initially granted, though even this was better than the almost completely symbolic domestic partnerships that the city of Laguna Beach offered in the early 90s).

Opposition to marriage equality came from not only those who sought to roll back gay rights, but also from those who, though in favor of gay rights, were either opposed to marriage itself, or felt that the gay community should be pursuing other goals. If you had asked me in 1995 if employment protections or marriage equality were more achievable, I would have said, “no doubt about it, employment.” I’ve seen arguments that we should have gone for ENDA. Employment protections are important, but during the same time that Obergefell moved through the courts, the Republicans have been in control of Congress. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act has no chance of budging in a Republican-controlled Congress. In other words, if all our efforts for marriage equality in the last five years had been applied to employment non-discrimination for LGBT people, we’d be in the same place on employment, and still not have marriage equality.

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Gambling in Esperanto

Baccarat? But I wanted
to study Esperanto!

Was every Esperanto club in 1907 Paris a front for a gambling den? It might seem that way. When I discovered an June 24, 1907 article about raid on a gambling den in Paris, I assumed it was the one that the WashingtonEvening Star had written about slightly later in 1907. Then I realized the names the proprietors were different. Did Paris really have two cunning ladies who decided that an Esperanto club would be the perfect cover for an illegal gambling den? At least that many. There were two separate raids on Esperanto clubs in 1907.

The article in the Los Angeles Times does not give the location of Madame Schwob’s gambling club. I’m going to make guess that it probably wasn’t too far off from Madame Beaujon’s secret club on the Boulevard Clichy, since another source does say that Madame Schwob also had an apartment on the Boulevard Clichy. I guess in 1907 it wasn’t just the place to go for an illegal baccarat club, but the place to go for an illegal baccarat club that was masquerading as an Esperanto group. But where did you go if you wanted your friends to think you were engaging in gambling, when you really just wanted to get together and talk Esperanto?

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The Tomb of the Cybermen — Blogging Doctor Who

A tomb? Don't you need
to be dead for one
of those?

At the end of “The Moonbase,” the Doctor expresses his wish that he not deal with the Cybermen again for a very long time. Had the BBC actually released the reconstructed “Underwater Menace,” there would have been a small break between “The Moonbase” and “The Tomb of the Cybermen.” Ironically, just after I finished watching “The Tomb of the Cybermen,” Amazon sent me an e-mail that “The Underwater Menace” was available for pre-order, but although they list a price, they don’t have a release date for it. I think we’ve heard this one before. So, instead, “The Tomb of the Cybermen” is the third of a sequence of Cybermen stories. The next serial I blog about will not have Cybermen in it (it’s an easy promise; I’ve already started watching “The Ice Warriors,” nothing’s showing up on my shelves that will make me say, “gotta watch this first”).

Our first encounter with the Cybermen was set in 1986, although it was a 1986 in which technology hadn’t much progressed beyond 1966. Then, we jumped forward to the only slightly more advanced time 2070, and everyone has assumed that the that the Cybermen were wiped out more than a century before with the destruction of Mondas. Now we’re at some unspecified future time when it is again believed that the Cybermen were wiped out years before. We’ve got a group that going to find their tombs. They have landed in the dorkiest-looking spaceship imaginable. On the other hand, we get a group shot of captain and crew, and I have to wonder if Captain Hopper chose his crew for looks, but I’ll get to that later. He clearly didn’t choose his spaceship for looks.

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Limericks in Esperanto

Ŝi havas grandegan kapon.

Here, once again, I’m complaining about journalists not doing their job. Even for a joke, you need to stick to the facts. The first cartoon with joking caption in the “Our Funny Man’s Column” in the Whitefish Pilot of June 22, 1911 makes a completely untrue statement about Esperanto. Where were the outraged letters to the editor noting that the Pilot had been complicit in spreading a scurrilous lie about the noble language Esperanto?

This was (at least as indexed at Chronicling America) the final time that the Pilot made any reference to Esperanto (Chronicling America only has it for 1908 through 1912, though the paper started in 1904 and is still published). The early press on Esperanto is filled inaccurate statements, including odd claims that the inventor of Esperanto was a Spaniard, or that he created the language while serving a long prison term. Not true. Not true.

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Veltlang at the Esperanto Meeting

The Veltlang Alphabet
Not sure if you can use it to write Esperanto

Veltlang clearly got more press than it deserved. Chronicling America has thirteen articles on it, ranging from its introduction in May 1910 through 1913 (when journalists seemed to tire of it). Its creator, Frederick Braendle, was a translator for the Pension Office (and so his designation of “Professor” was undoubtably self-conferred), who spoke sixteen languages. For the world, he gave English, slightly respelled with a new alphabet.

Those thirteen article are a bit too much coverage because Braendle’s only publication on Veltlang is a twelve-page pamphlet which gives little detail about the language itself (which, once again, is really English), and goes into greater detail of the somewhat mystical implications that Braendle felt his language had.

There does seem to have been a language, since he told the press the he used it in correspondence with friends. However, his book World-English, A New World Language, Veltlang, with English Words and English Grammar, Subject to the limitations of the phonetic writing of Veltlang, together with a simple phonetic world-alphabet, Seuastikon is his only book. (This title brings to mind the long titles of eighteenth-century novels, which are typically chopped down in modern editions.)

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