Imp of the Diverse: July 2014

Thursday, July 31, 2014

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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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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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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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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Professor Promotes Esperanto in Paris

George Picot
Not a professor

After all those spurious professors, I must add one more. Sorry.

And I’ve transcribed the piece below exactly. I check these things; I don’t want to subject my readers to typos, so I generally fix up any that I find. They didn’t intend a typo. I’m making an exception this time.

The Kansas City Journal in tis article in its edition of July 30, 1899, consistently misspells “Esperanto.” The language referred in the article is clearly Esperanto, but they published it as “Esparanto. Oops. Consistently. And enclosed in quotation marks. Surprisingly, they got ”Zamenhof" right.

Perhaps the unfamiliar word to American ears sounded as if someone were saying "Esparanto." Certainly, I've heard many people pronounce it with a schwa, making it unclear just what vowel is hiding in there. So perhaps I shouldn't take the Kansas City Journal too much to task.

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Looks awfully young
for a professor

As I noted yesterday, in the early twentieth century newspapers were more liberal about applying the title professor than they ought to have been. This was probably in part due to the practice of the day, in which the term was used more broadly than it is today. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that just about anyone offering Esperanto lessons was termed a “professor.” I've got another example of it today.

On July 30, 1908, Edmond Privat was a student and just shy of his nineteenth birthday. He did eventually get a degree, though it doesn't seem that Privat ever held a professorship anywhere. That didn't that didn’t stop the Omaha Daily Bee from describing him as “Prof. Edmonde Prevat of Geneva, Switzerland.” Well, they got the Geneva part right.

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Then what happened?

I wasn't able to find anything else in the archives about Frank Hensley, the "respectable young man," who was arrested for sodomy, according to this article from the Dallas Weekly Herald on July 30, 1885. The Weekly Herald didn't do a follow-up where they discussed what happened after this man's arrest.

I can make one guess: the 1880 Census includes a Frank Hensley, living in Dallas. In 1880, this Frank Hensley is 22 years old, single, and working as an assistant collector in a bank. In 1885, he would have been 27 or 28 years old. On the other hand, it looks like this Frank Hensley married in October, 1885.

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Are you taking notes in
Esperanto, Professor?

This sounds like one of those Internet come-on ads “Language Professors Hate this Man!” In this case, the man was Professor Walter Skeat, who was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge University. While I don’t have any books by Skeat in my library, the name was immediately familiar to me as a prominent scholar of the medieval forms of English in the late nineteenth and early early twentieth centuries. Despite the name of his position (in full the Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon), Skeat’s major contributions concerned the Middle English poets Chaucer and Langland.

I’m going to hazard a guess and assume that in addition to Old, Middle, and Modern English, Gothic (Skeat produced a work on Gothic), and German (Wikipedia notes his annoyance at German domination of English studies in his day), as a member of the clergy (professor and reverend), he probably also knew Latin, Greek, and maybe even Hebrew. That leaves only French (which is a possibility) and Polish (unlikely) to cover the roots of Esperanto.

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The Message Mystery

I wanted to follow up on a message I had sent but when I checked my sent mail (in Mavericks) it wasn’t there. I had sent it using Mail in Yosemite (my first one, actually). I was logged into Mavericks, but just to make sure I had sent it (though even a draft should show up everywhere), I logged into Yosemite. This should all work pretty invisibly. Failing to find it made me wonder if I deleted it when I intended to send it, though that would be strange. On the other hand, it was strange that it hadn’t synced up from the two installations of Mail.

I probably should have checked my iPad and iPhone as well. Mail should just quietly sync among these four places. Five, I suppose, if you count iCloud on the web.The Message Mystery
I went through the reboot and launched Mail (in Yosemite). It promptly hung up. The Spinning Beachball of Death. Damn. I force quit, sent the crash report to Apple, and told the program to relaunch. The e-mail was in my Sent box. I did send it.

While I was there, an e-mail came in that I decided to answer right away. Once that was done, I had something to do in Mavericks (specifically: photos; not opening the iPhoto database from Yosemite). Time for another reboot.

I think I like the Yosemite reboot better.

Now the e-mail that had sent me to the Yosemite e-mail in the first place was in the Sent box of Mail (Mavericks), but the one I had just sent wasn’t there. I waited. Nothing. I looked at my iPad. They were all there. Go figure.

I quit mail. No crashing this time. When it opened, everything was as I expected it.

A bit of a mystery and maybe one I would have had even without doing a beta test. No idea.

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The Wrong Recipe

Quick and easy, but way too lemony

Sometimes you just have to admit that a recipe doesn’t work for you. I’ve been using lamb neck frequently for a bolognese, which lead both and I to feel that we should find out what else can be down with lamb neck. We both independently found a blog post on lamb neck Provençal. Since I’m the guy who’s at home all day (don’t ask about the job hunt, just don’t), I got to it first.

Adam Roberts’s post doesn’t give any specifics, other than noting that he adapted a recipe from All About Braising: The Art of Uncomplicated Cooking by Molly Stevens. After some hunting, I found her recipe. It was fairly easy, and braises work nicely for us. It took me about forty-five minutes to get everything into the oven. Then we went off to the gym. That way we would spend two hours working out in anticipation of what we were going to eat.

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The first of many letters to the editor

Clearly the letters column of the Los Angeles Herald in the early years of the twentieth century was the Internet comment thread of its day. The Herald’s pages contained many letters by or responding to a Los Angeles resident named Val Stone. Alas, despite his prominence in the pages of the Herald (and not just in the letters column), he seemed difficult to find anywhere else. I did find a Valentine Stone living in Los Angeles in 1910, but he didn’t seem to be the right person, as he was only 16.

A 1906 article in the Herald describes him as “a prominent educator.” But after looking through many of the 133 references to Val Stone in the Herald (including one letter by a “Mrs. Val Stone,”), I have no clear picture of who Mr. Stone was. In his many letters to the Herald, he held forth on a number of subjects: appropriate punishment of criminals, dog registration, women’s rights (he was for them), Teddy Roosevelt (didn’t like him), and in what seems to be his first letter, Esperanto.

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A Diplomatic Reception for Esperanto

The Peace Palace, newly built.
Great place for an Esperanto reception

One clear advantage of having a prominent American diplomat at the head of the U.S. Esperanto organization while the group is hosting the World Esperanto Congress is that Diplomatic Corps can be called upon to attend an event. John Barrett, the Director of the Bureau of American Republics and president of the Esperanto Association of North America planned quite an elaborate soirée to coincide with the 1910 Universala Kongreso.

According to the Washington Times on July 28, 1910, the August 17 reception would have music from the United States Marine Band and speeches from members of the Diplomatic Corps who were in the city. And Barrett was probably justly proud of the new Pan-American Palace of Peace (now the main building of the Organization of American States).

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After that, they opened normally

I reformatted the test partition for Yosemite over what should have been a fairly simple matter. It came to a question of my ID. Long ago, when the iTunes Store started, I created a login using my (then) e-mail address (it’s still my e-mail address; I get all e-mail sent to it, but it forwards to the account I actually tell people to send to).

When I created my Yosemite install, I was asked for my Apple ID. The only problem is that my Apple ID is not my iCloud ID. That’s my @me address. The @me address showed up in the iCloud settings for Yosemite, noting that it was pending on response to an e-mail. I clicked the “Resend” button. Nothing.

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Frederick Mortimer Clapp
Art historian.
Photographic pioneer.
Not really a professor.

On July 28, 1909, the Los Angeles Times reported that Professor Frederick Mortimer Clapp made his first public exhibition “by means of a stereopticon reproduction of paintings of the world’s master artists.” Clapp’s claim was that his color process was better than those employed previously.

Wikipedia notes that prior to his becoming the first Director of the Frick Collection in 1931, Clapp had been the chair of the Art History program at the University of Pittsburgh from 1926. The Dictionary of Art Historians makes it clear that from 1906 to 1908, he was teaching Elizabethan drama and Russian literature at the University of California, Berkeley’s extension school. This clears up why some of the articles on his make reference to public lectures on Shakespeare, while others talks were about the exaltation of the nude in art (Clapp preferred the undraped figure). If the Dictionary of Art Historians is correct, then reports from 1908 of his being a professor at the University of Chicago or Harvard are likely erroneous. To be a real stickler, the term professor was erroneous.

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He was a very naughty boy

This is a short item. Filler items just tend to proliferate. Find it in one newspaper, and before long you find the same blind item repeated in newspaper after newspaper, with no indication whatsoever what the ultimate source was. Some years ago, a professor cited the adage that the United States and England are "separated by a common language," which he attributed to Oscar Wilde (it wasn't a class on English literature). I said that it was certainly not a Wilde quote, and said I had seen it attributed to George Bernard Shaw. The professor, being a professor, suggested I track it down. The aphorism has its origin in a blind item published in Readers' Digest, where it was unattributed.

The Bisbee Daily Review ran a brief article in their July 28, 1921 edition. Esperanto was thirty-four years old at the time, so you would think the history was well established. This is what the Daily Review wrote:

Esperanto, the international language, was invented by Dr. Zamenhof during 15 years captivity in a Polish prison.

Really?

Let's quickly review the history of Esperanto.

L. L. Zamenhof was born in 1859. Before heading off to college, young Eliezer (later Ludovik) Zamenhof created an international language, which gets referred to as "pra-Espernato." This was finished in about 1878. His father told him to put it aside, and it would all be there when he got back from college. When Eliezer went off to college, his father destroyed his son's work.

Eliezer went back to work on the language during his nights, while treating patients for diseases of the eye during the day. His fiancée's father helped pay for publishing the Unua Libro. That brings us to 1887. Let's do the math: 1887-1859 = 28, but the Unua Libro was published on July 26, and Zamenhof's birthday is December 15. Zamenhof was 27 years old when he published Esperanto.

If he had spent fifteen years in prison, he would have gone in sometime after his twelfth birthday.

Update: This short item was also printed in the Norwich Bulletin of Norwich, Connecticut of July 5, 1921 and the Hays Free Press of Hays, Kansas of October 20, 1921. Repetition didn't make it any more accurate.

Update 2: The Los Angeles Times carried a somewhat longer version of this on July 17, 1921.

Esperanto, the only one of all the many so-called universal languages that shows any signs of survival, was invented by Dr. Zamenhof during fifteen years' captivity in a Polish prison.

This longer version is probably closer to the original, but obviously the earlier publication shows that it's taken from a somewhat earlier source.

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Sunday, July 27, 2014

A Mavericks Interlude

Where did it all go?

For a while, it seemed that I didn’t need the help of a beta operating system in order to mess up my e-mail. In preparation for taking a look at Mail in Yosemite, I backed up my computer, and after both Tardis and Spegulo were up to date, I started transferring mail into offline mailboxes. I probably keep too much mail in my inbox, as most of it could be sorted into a folder the day it arrived (maybe I should create a way of filtering mail from vendors more than a week old out of my inbox).

I typically keep mail in my inbox for about six months, unless I’m on some sort of mad purge (like this time). Anything I’ve moved into offline mailboxes can’t be found on my iOS devices, so keeping some of this stuff around isn’t too crazy (though, once again, there’s no excuse to having a five-month-old e-mail from Sur La Table in my inbox.

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So, do I take the plunge?

I’ve been using the Yosemite public beta for three days now, and it’s time to check back in. I’m beginning to feel that I need to rethink my initial reluctance to play with Mail in the new OS. Mail is one of the big changes. Should I really wait until the final release to look at Mail?

I need to take some precautions. I’m a sloppy Mail user, typically keeping the last six months of mail in my main mailbox on the Apple mail servers (it doesn’t take up that much space). That can be a bit of a pain when I travel; a couple of time my mail has undergone a lengthy synchronization, as everything gets updated to the time zone I’m in. First step, trim back on the Inbox.

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The word for "church" is "preĝejo."

As I read through some of the articles on Esperanto from the beginning of the twentieth century, I keep being struck by how overtly religious (specifically Christian) the Esperanto movement was in that period. Many of the early American Esperantists seemed to view Esperanto as a tool for promoting Christianity (the general view of the Esperanto movement is that any use of Esperanto is a good use of Esperanto; the movement itself only promotes Esperanto).

One of the leaders of the Christian Endeavor movement had been active in the early Esperanto movement in the United States. The Good Templars, a Christian temperance group, adopted Esperanto at one point (and seem to have quietly dropped it thereafter). A 1912 article focussed almost wholly on Esperanto in Christian organizations.

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For and Against Esperanto in the Sun

Dr. Henri Vallienne.

The New York Sun probably wasn’t aware that it was Esperanto Day when Henri Vallienne’s dialog Por kaj Kontraŭ Esperanto came to their attention. On July 26, 1908, Esperanto was just twenty-one years old. The second Universala Kongreso was some weeks away (the tradition of holding it to coincide with Esperanto Day clearly hadn’t begun, as the 1908 Dresden convention started on the 15th of August, 1908). For that matter, while they called Dr. Vallienne’s book “a recent publication,” it was a product of 1906.

According to the Esperanto Wikipedia, Henri Vallienne was a French physician and Esperantist. He wrote both original works and translations.

The article is too long to transcribe here (I realize my blog isn’t going to run out of room, but at a column and a half, it’s more typing of someone else’s words than I’m up for today). Instead, I’ll quote such sections and comment on them as I go.

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Esperanto.
Yummy, yummy Esperanto.

Today is Esperanto Day.

If you Google "Esperanto Day," you'll get a number of sites that equate it with Zamenhof Day, the anniversary of the birth of L. L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. No, they're two separate days.

Zamenhof day comes in December. But on July 26, 1887, the twenty-eight year old L. L. Zamenhof published the first book about Esperanto. It was published in Poland and was in Russian and Esperanto. Subsequently, it was translated into a variety of other languages, including (eventually) English.

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My Trip to Yosemite (the OS not the place)

Ready to take the plunge?

I am one of the million people who signed up for Apple’s public beta of OS 10.10 Yosemite. I suspect that I am not unique among my friends and that the few hundred people I know probably contain a few others who are either also in the public beta pool or have Apple developer accounts (no limit on the numbers, pay your $99 and you’re in). The developer accounts also have the chance to download XCode 6 beta and play with the new Swift programming language, and they can download the beta versions of iOS 8, though I’m not trusting my phone to beta software. Nor am I trusting my computer to beta software.

I took the reasonably prudent course and installed Yosemite on a second, smaller partition. That was, itself, a bit of a trial. Or, several trials. I opened up Disk Utility and attempted to create a new partition. And I locked up my computer. So, I quit everything, and tried again.

And I locked up my computer.

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Was it a close vote?

I'd make a bet that it's been a long time since the U.S. Esperanto congress attracted any press attention outside of the city where it was held (and the most recent one seems to have received none at all). The conventions in the first few decades of the Esperanto moment got a lot of press attention.

The Sun and New York Herald persisted in referring to Edward S. Payson as "Dr. Payson." Payton was neither Ph.D. nor M.D., but the president of Emerson Piano of Boston. Oddly enough, the trade press of the piano industry called him "Colonel Payson." Odd thing to call a Yankee.

As noted before, this was a meeting of about fifty people. I'm going to guess that the New York Times would probably ignore events with 500 people taking place over a weekend in Manhattan, although the Times did cover the convention in one small article, which adds that the president of the New York Esperanto Association was Miss Cora L. Butler, and that she gave the welcoming address.

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Let's have some order here!

Just a short news item from the July 25, 1856 New Orleans Daily Crescent.

Catherine Webber was fined $15 for keeping a disorderly brothel; two of her boarders were fined $5 each, and four others sent to the Work-house.

I did a quick bit of searching and wasn't able to find anything about Ms. Webber. Typically I like to fill out the historical record a bit more, but then there was that term, "disorderly brothel." Disorderly houses were places of prostitution, drug use, or such. By definition, a brothel is already "disorderly."

There was a Catherine Webber living in New Orleans in 1850, the wife of one J. G. Webber. The couple was from Germany and lived with their children and two women (presumably Mrs. Webber's sisters). The 1860 census doesn't show a Webber family living in New Orleans.

Could J.G. Webber, the 29-year-old German merchant of the 1850 census been dead by 1856 and his wife become a brothel-keeper in order to raise funds? Who were the "boarders"? Since they were fined, they clearly weren't so much boarders as prostitutes.

Then there were the four sent to the work house. I really wan to know how the judge made the distinction. Perhaps the other four weren't the actual prostitutes, but those who were helping run the establishment.

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Thursday, July 24, 2014

Parents, Don't Send Your Children to Brothels

Don't do it. It's bad parenting.

Wait a minute, was this sort of thing legal beforehand? On July 24, 1878 the Clearfield Republican of Clearfield, Pennsylvania wrote about a change in the laws, effective at some point in 1878 (since the article describes it as "the law of 1878"). I wonder if there were people who looked at the law and thought, "there goes the government, telling parents what they can and can't do with their children."

Is the whole point of the article that under the law in 1877 parents actually could do these things? I used the word "brothels" in the title, because it actually shows up in the article. Were women being sent into prostitution by their families?

A NEW DEPARTURE — Under the law of 1878, people who unnecessarily beat or ill use their children, hire them to acrobats and gymnasts, or beggars, keep them in brothels or at indecent or dangerous occupation, are not only liable to punishment, but may have them taken from their custody and put under charge or guardians appointed by the court.

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Big Plans for Conference in Washington

They didn't say what kind of record

In 1910, the World Esperanto Congress was held in Washington D.C. It was one of the smallest, beaten out only by a convention in far-off California during World War I. As I’ve been reading the articles on it, I found myself wondering when they realized that they were putting on a smaller meeting. Yet according to what they shared with the Washington Times on July 24, 1910, they were expecting to "break the former records for numbers of delegates and followers of the new universal language.

To be record setting, the conference would have needed to exceed the 1,500 participants of the 1908 and 1909 conferences. As I’ve noted before, the 1910 congress had only 357 participants.

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Thirteenth U.S. Esperanto Congress Held in New York

The Sun and New York Herald reported on July 23, 1920 that the thirteenth conference of the Esperanto Association for North America was taking place in New York City. They started with an open meeting on Thursday, July 22 at the Bahai Library. The building is now gone, replaced by a skyscraper. The description of the first congress in Chautauqua in 1908 claimed nearly a thousand participants. The August 1920 Amerika Esperantisto lists about fifty people who attended the conference.

They also published a group photo. This was taken outside the Bahai Library on July 23, 1920.

The attendees of the 1920 US Esperanto conference

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In July 1908, Mrs. Wilbur Crafts asked the Washington D.C. school system to consider teaching Esperanto. The response she received from the Superintendent of Schools really promised nothing other than that it might get on the agenda for discussion. The National Tribune questioned the wisdom of this.

In their July 23, 1908 edition, they did so in a manner that is timeless.

A Mrs. Wilbur Crafts, who, with her husband, has acquired more kinds of knowledge which won’t do anybody any good than most anybody else living, is now trying to induce the School Board of Washington to introduce “Esperanto” into the schools of the city. Now, what for? If the kids in the Washington schools could be taught a little more mathematics, spelling, geography, grammar and common sense no one would kick. But to add to the lack of common education in the commonest studies Esperanto would be to increase a vacuum. The pupils of Washington schools are turned out notoriously bad spellers. The things they know about the history of the United States would go on a sheet of notepaper. They do not know how to hunt for knowledge in a cyclopedia, and they have small use for a dictionary. Yet Esperanto would be added to the course! Shucks!

Timeless because it just keeps getting repeated. I saw a variety of this rant on Facebook just a few days ago. The sort of thing that gets posted by people in their 40s and 50s, complaining that teens of today lack the studiousness that people in the poster’s era had. Of course, when they were teens, people said the same thing.

When was this golden age of learning from which we have fallen?

Update: I've belatedly fixed a transcription error, and one that has a name. It's called an "eyeskip." When I transcribed the National Tribune's article, I jumped from one "anybody" (after "won't do") to the next next (before "else living"). My apologies for the transcription error. I try to keep these as error-free as possible, but typos do creep in.

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Tuesday, July 22, 2014

An Esperanto Organization for the United States

William K. Harvey
Early American
Esperantist

If it weren’t for George Alan Connor, the national Esperanto organization in the United States would be 106 today. (This post was written in 2014; adjust this number to compensate for the year in which you are reading this.) By 1908, Floyd Barnes Harbin was already jumping the gun and announcing a book to be titled History of the Esperanto Movement in America (I haven’t turned up any evidence that the book was ever published). In the February 1908 Amerika Esperantisto, Mr. Harbin was asking people to pay 10¢ to get their names in a complete directory of American Esperantists. If Mr. Harbin published the book, it would be a directory of those who sent in the 10¢, and maybe not a complete directory of all the Esperantists in the United States.

But the oddest thing was that in February 1908 there really wasn’t much history of the Esperanto movement in America to write about. Not none, but not much. There was, at the time of the 1908 conference in Chautauqua, at least sixty-seven local Esperanto societies in the United States. The state with the largest number of groups was Massachusetts with eight, though there were two in Boston, one specially for the blind. One of the goals of the 1908 Chautauqua conference was to found a national society.

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High Hopes for Esperanto at Beginning of First American Conference

A good start for Esperanto

On July 20, 1908, the New York Sun included an article on the first American Esperanto conference. I suspect that the recent North American conference didn't receive quite as detailed attention from the press.

The Sun quotes the Reverend Horace M. Dutton who was, by the way, the brother of Edward P. Dutton, the publisher. E. P. Dutton is now an imprint of the Penguin Group. Horace Dutton was an a minister who became active in the both Esperanto movement and the Christian Endeavor movement. He was born on July 16, 1840, so when he was at the Esperanto conference, he was just past his sixty-eighth birthday. Earlier in the year, the Christian Endeavor society had announced its intention to use Esperanto to further its aims; Reverend Dutton almost certainly involved in that.

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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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Léon Bérard. Not a fan
of Esperanto

Esperanto got bounced from French universities, but the claimed reason wasn’t that the language might compete with French (quelle horreur!) but because “it is one of the favorite mediums for spreading Communistic propaganda. The article in the July 16, 1922 Ogden Standard-Examiner ascribes that opinion to ”leading French educators."

The article goes on to quote one of those “leading French educators,” Léon Bérard, the minister of education. Bérard was a prominent opponent of Esperanto, not only banning it in the public schools of France, but also was one of the key figures in causing the League of Nations to reject a resolution in favor of Esperanto. During World War II, he was the Ambassador to the Holy See from the collaborationist Vichy government. The Nazis established their own ban on Esperanto (among other things, including Braille) in 1940. The Nazis sought to wipe out Esperanto, not just ban it from their mails though.

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Learn this man's
secret for speaking
a foreign language

William Alexander wrote in the New York Times about the trials of learning a foreign language.

I used to joke that I spoke French like a 3-year-old. Until I met a French 3-year-old and couldn’t hold up my end of the conversation.

I think I’ve put in more hours of learning French than Mr. Alexander (I started in 1974), and while my studies seem to include none of the things he did, I am able to read eighteenth-century French in the original. “Tonight, sweetheart, we’ll be reading Voltaire’s Zadig in French for your bedtime story.” I don’t think I’d hand Adolphe to a 3-year-old (I think it’s standard for high schoolers in France though).

But even with my abilities to read eighteenth-century novels, Le Monde, and Têtu in French, I know that my abilities to speak are somewhat more limited. I. Speak. French. Much. More. Slowly. Than. I. Speak. English. I have actually had casual conversation in French. Some years ago, I was in D.C. and was asked a question in very bad English by a French woman who was at the museums. She had trouble understanding my English, so we both switched to French.

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Washington D.C. Schools Asked to Consider Esperanto

The Washington Times, in an article on July 15, 1908, made reference to “Mrs. Wilbur F. Crafts, a Chautauqua lecturer.” A “Chautauqua lecturer” is one who is on the teaching staff of what is now called the Chautauqua Institution, which had its start as the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly. Chautauqua was home to the first Volapuk convention in the United States, as well as the first Esperanto convention in the United States.

So, who is Mrs. Wilbur F. Crafts? Clearly, she is someone who became well accustomed to going by her husband’s name. In the 1930 census, she’s listed as “Wilbur F. Crafts,” though her sex is marked with an F. Clearly the census taker was told that she was Mrs. Wilbur F. Crafts, and that was that. The 1900 census (when Wilbur was still alive) makes it clear that her given name was Sara, and that she was born in August of 1851. Her profession is given as “authoress.”

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Convicted by the paper though he
didn't survive to be tried

A somewhat grim story from the news archives, but I felt that this story, with all its gray areas needed to be told. I ran into a total brick wall on researching anything, although there are some errors in the article (which makes things tough). Here are the particulars: a man was arrested on a charge of sodomy on July 15, 1915. When he learned that several complaints were being made against him, he attempted suicide, being successful on the second attempt.

Other details are less clear. The Ward County Independent gives the man’s name as E. O. Edwards (not helpful in finding additional details), and his age as 21. The North Dakota death indexes give his age as 36. So was he born in 1894 or 1879? Which record do you believe? The article also notes that the officials notified the dead man’s brother, “a locomotive engineer, at Lance, Nebr.” There’s no such place. Nor does it show up on a list of Nebraska ghost towns. There is a town called Alliance, and when I checked the census records, I found a John W. Edwards, who worked as a railroad engineer, probably the brother mentioned in the article.

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Justice, Not Lynching, after Sodomy Charge

Another point on the
arc of the moral universe

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century newspapers, there's a depressing regularity to the stories of black men raping white boys. Look for "sodomy," and they keep coming up. I haven't found anything of particular interest in them, even though they are the stories that get a little fleshed out (most of the items simply name a person who has been charged or convicted of sodomy).

But The Appeal, of Saint Paul, Minnesota, which described itself as "A National Afro-American Newspaper" had an article in its July 13, 1901 edition that helps put these stories into context. Okay, we have these horrible stories of black men raping white boys (it's either black men or "hoboes"), but that doesn't mean that they're true.

Here's what The Appeal reported:

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The first marriage of a
same-sex couple?

Many opponents of, or even those skeptical of same-sex marriage act as if same-sex couples are some sort of modern novelty, and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito made the claim that same-sex marriage was “newer than cell phones.” Even if same-sex marriage were newer than cell phones, it’s not clear that would necessarily put it outside of constitutional protection.

An article in the Springfield Daily Republic of Springfield, Ohio on July 13, 1888, suggests that same-sex marriage might be significantly older than the cell phone. The article describes it as perhaps “the first case on record where one man was duly married to and living with another.” For that, of course, they had to get around the usual procedures.

How they did that, it’s not clear. Perhaps George Burton had been living long enough as a hermaphrodite that they were able to convoke the clergyman, J. Y. Campbell, that Burton counted as a woman. But then why did they name the bride Georgeann Holly?

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Volapük and Life, Henry James and Love

In a group of short items in the Mexico Weekly Ledger, of Mexico, Missouri, on July 12, 1888 is an item that seems to slight either Volapük, the town of Walla Walla, or maybe both.

A Volapuk club has been formed in Walla Walla, W. T. We are glad to see that Walla Walla people now have something to live for.

That's just harsh.

The next item notes that

Henry James boasts that he has never loved a woman. If from this we can infer that he has loved a man we think we can name the man.

I'm sure they mean Henry James loved himself, since in 1888, they weren't likely to be suggesting that he loved other men, though in point of fact he did. What he did about that is a question that will probably never be answered, though he did describe himself in 1904 as "hopelessly celibate."

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Minnesota Republican Candidate Warns of the Danger of Semen

Bob Frey. Thinks enzymes in
semen causes AIDS

Bob Frey, who is running for the Minnesota legislature, has come up with an explanation of how AIDS happens. It’s so completely ignorant that anyone who ever attempted (and clearly failed) to teach Mr. Frey science should be ashamed. Or in need of a stiff drink. Or both.

The Minneapolis Post reports that Frey did not get his party’s endorsement, nor did his rival in the primaries. He claims to be devoted to keeping government accountable and limited. Then there’s that sodomy thing.

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Comfort Food — Turkey Pot Pie

Mmm. Pie. With turkey

This is one of those “I don’t know why I didn’t do it long ago” items. When I was growing up, my mother would often deal with leftover turkey by making turkey pot pie (on the other hand, this was not something James’s mother made). On a purely linguistic note, the phrase “turkey pot pie” refers to turkey and vegetables cooked in a casserole covered with a pastry crust, and this is often how my mother made it, with the dish forming the “pot” of the name. The term is often used, however, for any meat pie, including those with both a top and bottom crust.

I opted to make a two-crusted pie (which my mother did), but going completely against maternal precedent, I decided to incorporate some whole wheat flour into the mix. I consulted a variety of sources and realized that with white whole wheat, I could get a lot of whole wheat into it. I decided not to chance a 100% whole wheat crust, but I could do nearly 50%.

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Esperanto’s Little Advertiser

How he learned it

A twelve-year-old sent in a letter to the children’s page of the New-York Tribune, where it was published on July 10, 1910, in which he gives a description of Esperanto and his involvement in it. Young Joseph Lepsey was quite active in the New Haven Esperanto Club. He was their librarian in 1911, at the age of 13.

In the June, 1911 issue of Amerika Esperantisto he was described as “kredeble la plej juna esperantisto en la urbo” (credibly the youngest Esperantist in the the city) and founded a club just for young esperantists, the Zamenhofa Rondo de Junaj Esperantistoj. In this, he was joined by Mabel DeScheen, Frederick Knodel, Josefo de Scheen, and George W. Wilber.

It’s not clear after this flurry of activity that Mr. Lepsey was later active in the movement. Records indicate that he was unmarried at the age of 42, living with his mother, and working as an advertising agent. He died in 1986, so there might be some Esperantists in the New Haven area who knew him, if he remained active.

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Roy K. Moulton,
funny man

Roy K. Mouton clearly didn't think much of Esperanto, so much that he was moved to mock the language in a fairly long poem, printed in at the Daily Missoulian of Missoula, Montana on July 10, 1912. It wasn't just Esperanto; his column was fairly tongue-in-cheek. The first item in "On the Spur of the Moment" was on how to make money. Well, you can either counterfeit coin, or you can counterfeit bills. He does suggest that this be done in "a nice dark cellar, which has no windows in it."

Mr. Moulton was an American humorist who lived from 1874 (or perhaps 1876) to 1928. The only book-length works I can find attributed to him are The Blue Jeans of Hoppertown, A Good Friend of Mine, and I Held Her Hand, which were written between 1908 and 1911. After that, he seems to have stuck to the newspapers. He was born Michigan and was living there in 1910. By 1920, he had moved to New York (specifically Queens). He listed his profession as a writer.

But maybe not a poet. Here's the poem.

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Europeans in D.C.
Alert the media!

If you know some Esperanto, the first line of this article from the July 10, 1910 Washington Times is comically bad. The article is one of the many in the Washington press as the sixth Universala Kongreso neared.

You can skip this paragraph if you've been reading my blog: The sixth World Esperanto Congress was held in Washington, D.C. This was the first time that the congress met outside Europe. The Esperanto movement had high hopes for the success of the meeting.

Its headline "Europeans Coming to Visit Capital," hardly seems worth mentioning. Surely, even in 1910, Washington D.C. must have had something to attract the attention of foreign visitors. The National Museum of Natural History had just opened its new building. The Smithsonian Institution was there as well. Certainly, the World Congress had tourism plans for the area.

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Sexted girlfriend, abused by police

Yesterday, the Manassas, Virginia police got some national intention with their warrant to inject a 17-year-old with drugs to induce an erection so that they could compare this to a video the young man is alleged to have sent to his 15-year-old girlfriend, after she sent him sexually explicit pictures.

I didn't mention that part yesterday, that she sent pictures. Why haven't the Manassas police forced her to strip, to show that the pictures on his phone really are his girlfriend? Sure, her mother complained, but why aren't both teens being charged with distribution of child pornography?

Let's be serious, if we're going to insane.

Obviously, Virginia should just drop all the charges, maybe put him on a cell-phone less probation until he's 18, and tell him not to show his underage junk to anyone else. USA Today (among other sources) provided the update.

Douglas Keene, the Manassas chief of police, told a local television station

When I found out about it, we determined we would not proceed.

Good call.

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Protection of Marriage —1920 Edition

Till death, or Congress,
do you part

One of the claims made by the opponents of marriage for same-sex couples is that by allowing same-couples to marry, marriage will be further devalued. Some go on to say that the real enemy is divorce (since in any given year, it’s likely that there will be more divorces of opposite-sex couples than marriages of same-sex couples), but that if they give up on same-sex marriage, they will never be able to fight divorce.

That doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me (then again, the objections to same-sex marriage don't make any sense to me). What if they tried it? Then they could find out what the public reaction was, if they had any hope of making divorce difficult or impossible to obtain.

It would seem that in 1920, someone tried just that: fighting divorce, and the New York Evening World was having none of it, printing this editorial on July 10, 1920.

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Duck with Cherries — My Life as a Sauciere

Duck with cherries

We have made a couple of attempts at duck with cherries; each time, I’ve taken the position of making sauce. This is where all the work is, since the other part of cooking duck is score the skin and slap it down on a hot skillet. Then you sauce it.

The New York Times had a recipe for duck breast with cherries, and we wanted to make it during that window when cherries are in season. My (minimal) research showed me that there are variants of this dish, including caneton aux pêches, duck with peaches, so it can be thought of as duck with some stone fruit. James offered the opinion (and I concur) that the dish needs some acid with the sweet, so instead of duck with peaches, maybe apricots.

But we were using cherries. The first time I made this dish, I tried pitting the cherries with a knife, and in the end just halved them. But I knew it would look so much nicer with the whole, round cherries. So I bought a pitter.

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Attractive. And tasty

I admit it. I’m one of those horrid people who take pictures of their food at restaurants. And sometimes at home too. I was doing this even before starting the blog, and mostly it was for the same reason that I take pictures of artwork at museums: to remember it better later. (When I went to the Orangerie in Paris, I did something different. I took pictures of Monet’s Water Lilies with my big lens. I wanted to see the brushstrokes, and there’s no way they would have let me get that close to the paintings.)

In the New York Times, Pete Wells makes the claim that chefs are reacting to that reality, even though a dimly-lit restaurant is often a really bad place to try to take a decent photo. (I do wonder, when they’re creating their dishes in a brightly-lit kitchen, do they think about what they’re going to look like the subtle lighting in the dining room? Let me be blunt; some places to increase the feeling of intimacy put you in the dark.) Wells makes the claim that chefs are making plates more photogenic at the expense of tasting good.

But I wondered if Wells was right about one claim he made:

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Thursday, July 31, 2014

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Monday, July 28, 2014

Sunday, July 27, 2014

Saturday, July 26, 2014

Friday, July 25, 2014

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Sunday, July 20, 2014

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Sunday, July 13, 2014

Saturday, July 12, 2014

Friday, July 11, 2014

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Wednesday, July 9, 2014