Esperanto Saves the World!

An alien!
(from another story)

I would think that if aliens were monitoring Earth broadcasts in order to determine what language they should use in contacting Earth, they would choose English. This was not the conclusion of the aliens in J. G. Frederick’s The Planet Juggler, which was originally published in the November 1908 All-Story, and then subsequently serialized in the Washington Times in 1910, from May 5 through 12. I cannot pretend that there is anything more than incidental reference to Esperanto, but as this story hits two of my major interests (Esperanto and science fiction), it’s pretty irresistible (if only Frederick had worked in cooking, although in 1908, there’s no way he could have worked in gay rights, which didn’t even exist as a concept).

But the alien isn’t actually monitoring Earth broadcasts. Radio was in its experimental days, and the first successful transmission of speech was only a few years before. It would be likely that no Esperanto had been transmitted by radio before the end of 1908. However, Frederick makes clear in the second chapter that the alien voice, a individual from Canopus, has been monitoring the sights and sounds of earth for ten years, but it was only with the developments in wireless that the alien was able to speak to Earth. There had been suggestions at about the same time that civilizations on other worlds would speak Esperanto.

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The Antichrist Speaks Esperanto

Father Benson
Said the Antichrist would
speak Esperanto

Quick check: does Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders speak Esperanto? If so, some people might be afraid, very, very afraid. Let me be quite clear here that I am not suggesting that Senator Sanders is the Antichrist; the idea is utterly absurd. It’s just that on May 2, 1908, the New York Sun ran an article on Robert Hugh Benson’s 1907 novel[1] The Lord of the World, in which the Antichrist is a Senator from Vermont who becomes President of Europe, and eventually President of the World, and imposes Esperanto on the world.[2] Benson was a Roman Catholic priest and writer, though Benson was raised in the Anglican Church, as his father was the Archbishop of Canterbury.

I’ll admit to never having heard of the novel before this, and my expectation was that it would turn out to be a forgotten early-twentieth century work. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead, as Wikipedia notes, Popes Benedict XIV and Francis have praised the move. It seems to be favored reading among conservative Catholic intellectuals. It’s an apocalyptic novel, treating progressive social movements as harbingers of the End Times.[3] The novel makes it clear that the establishment of world peace is a rejection of God. A quick glance through it shows Father Benson’s fears were that modernity was a sign of the approach of the Antichrist, and so various internationalist movements like the Peace and Esperanto movements seem to have troubled him.[4]

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Esperanto and Reverse Colonization

A vision of the future!

One of the anxieties of the late twentieth century was “reverse colonization.” There is a classic paper on this subject called “The Occidental Tourist,” which looks at themes of reverse colonization in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Count Dracula’s aim is not only to munch on the dainty dainty neck of Lucy Westerna,[1] but to gain dominion over the West. The count is, after all an Eastern European nobleman.

It wasn’t Dracula alone. Several years ago, I took a class called “Turns of the Century” which looked at, in part, how during the (approximately) twenty years with 1900 at their middle, certain themes predominated and paramount among these fears was that of “reverse colonization”: the fear that the once dominated would become the dominant.

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The Other International Language — Love

Here's a story that I stumbled on while searching through newspaper archives. By story, I mean "work of fiction." Instead of my usual practice of quoting sections and commenting, I've undergone the labor of transcribing the whole thing.

Since I've already tagged it as such, there's no harm in admitting that this story involves Esperanto. While I have seen Esperanto used in stories before (I forget whether I started reading Harry Harrison just before or just after I started learning Esperanto), this is the only story I've seen in which Esperanto plays a major plot point. (I've heard that the same is true of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, but I haven't read it yet, despite that it is only a few feet from me as I type this.)

A century ago, newspapers simply didn't have the type available to write the special Esperanto characters (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, and ŭ), and digital typography wasn't even a dream (if you went back in time a century, good luck trying to explain Unicode to a compositor). Typically people either omitted the accents (paĝo becoming pago), or they would write very carefully, avoiding words with accents. In the piece in the Rock Island Argus of June 2, 1908, the h-system was used instead.

There are several ways of writing in Esperanto. The wholly legit one is to use the accented characters. Easily done in handwriting, and I've seen typescript where the accents were inked in afterwards. The second way, proposed by Zamenhof at the beginning, was to use h to indicate an accented consonant (and omitting the breve over the u). Others have used apostrophes, though that breaks up the word almost as badly as Zamenhof's original idea of separating parts of words with apostrophes. The most common one seen was a product of the computer age, the x-system, which inserts an x, with the intention that words sort properly (though Zamenhof did not treat the accented letters as distinct letters, since his initial dictionary merges letters and their accented variants.

The story uses the h-system way of writing Esperanto. For the purists among us (including me), I've appended a version of the Esperanto with accented letters.

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