Esperanto, The Improbable

Israel Gollancz
Not a fan of Esperanto

Duolingo is just another chapter in applying technology to language learning (not to knock Duolingo, I think it’s great). Its forebears included language lessons by early twentieth century cylinder recordings (including Esperanto), and radio was considered, as noted in a July 2, 1922 article in the Washington Post. At the risk of belaboring the point, radio is one of those technologies that can be called “the Internet of its day”; a technology that transformed how information was handled (until the next transformation).

Radio brought the world closer, and Wikipedia notes that in the 1920s, shortwave radio grew rapidly, “similar to the internet.” As sounds were being transmitted over ever-greater distances, there came the question of what language those sounds would be in. Several pundits, including Professor Arnold Christen, suggested that Esperanto be the language of the airwaves.

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Esperanto By Radio

Esperanto on the air

If you follow the sources, there’s some confusion about the middle name of the Esperantist radio expert mentioned in a short item in the June 17, 1922 Evening World. The World gives his name as “James Denison Sayers.” Geoffrey Sutton in Consise Encyclopedia of the Original Literature of Esperanto, 1887–2000 gives his name as “James Denton Sayers,” and on Vikipedio, he’s listed as “James Denson Sayers.” We’re giving this one to Vikipedio, since that’s he wrote on his draft registration cards.

Sayers (now that we’ve properly identified him), was a telegraph operator, novelist (including one in Esperanto), and founding member of the Esperanto League of North America (the organization that rose as a rival and successor to the Esperanto Association of North America, after EANA was pushed out of the Universal Esperanto-Asocio), and one distressing thing (I’ll get to it, reluctantly). At the same time, Arnold Christen was also talking about the important of Esperanto to radio.

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Esperanto on the Air

Our man
on the air

In the early twentieth century, radio—transmitting voice over the air—seemed like something out of science fiction. It was the technology that was going to transform the world, bringing the world closer together. With that great advance, there needed to be a way that all those distant broadcasts could be understood. What a better match for radio than Esperanto?

And who better to promote this than Professor Arnold Christen (misnamed in this article as Arnold Christian). At the time the Washington Herald wrote about his plans for a series of lectures and addresses in Esperanto, he was still using his (former) affiliation with the University of Glascow, although he had been in the United States since 1909, without holding any formal university affiliation. At the time that he was proclaiming that Esperanto and radio were a perfect match, he had been a naturalized citizen since 1914.

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Professor Claimed Esperanto Would Be Important to Radio (1922)

Radio days

While there is a Columbus State University, this June 10, 1922 article from the Washington Herald is probably referring to Columbia University, as Professor A. Christen gave both a summer course and a public lecture there based on his book From Babel to Esperanto. I have not been able to find anything further (like his name) about Professor Christen. It does seem that he was legitimately a professor, specializing in linguistics (and I feel obligated to point out that the discipline was much different in 1922).

They seem to have got the professor's contention backwards though, since they titled the article "Believes Radio Aid to Esperanto." But Christen's opinion seems to work in the other direction. It's not that Esperanto needs radio, but that if we're going to communicate by radio, we need Esperanto.

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