North Dakota News of Esperanto

Civilization demands Esperanto!

The Pioneer Express of Pembina, North Dakota got to Esperanto fairly early. In July 1901, most people in the United States were completely unaware of Esperanto. There had been the occasional reference beforehand (dating all the way back to Esperanto’s introduction in 1887), but as Esperanto neared its fourteenth birthday, out of the slightly more 5,567 Esperantists (that number being the final name in the listings that ended for January 14, 1901), almost none were Americans.

[Digression 1. Esperantist 5,567 was Miss Ingeborg Bergqvist, of Södertelge, Sweden, and her name had been sent in by J. J. Süssmuth.]

[Digression 2. It’s not a solo project to create, so I won’t be the one, but it would be great to have a database of the early Esperantists listed in these directories. I really don’t want to type in tens of thousands of names; I just don’t have the time. Really, we need people to take ranges of a couple hundred names at a shot. Then I could simply search to find out how many Americans were in the international movement. Series XXI of the Adresaro de la Esperantistoj includes two Americans, neither of them in North Dakota.]

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Professors Battle over Esperanto and Ido

Me? Create Ido? Be serious!

In 1910, George Macloskie, a professor of biology, made some remarks about Ido to the Washington Herald. More than a month later, Louis Couturat, a professor of mathematics and one of the leading proponents of Ido, responded.

We have the sequel. The earlier part is lost, alas. Louis Couturat wrote a letter to the Washington Herald, which they published on September 26, 1910. In it, he refers to an article that appeared in the August 15th edition. Unfortunately, the scanned copy at the Chronicling America web site is missing three pages. Undoubtably, the interview to which Couturat and Macloskie refer was on one of those pages. (The interview has been found! See the bottom of the post for more details.) The remaining pages have plenty about Esperanto; at the time, the sixth Universala Kongreso was taking place in Washington, D.C. and the D.C. papers gave it a lot of coverage. It would be nice to know what Macloskie said about Ido (beyond attributing its creation to Couturat), but that’s not likely to happen.

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