Newspaper Misses the Whole Point of Esperanto

Against Esperanto?
How can you be
against Esperanto?

The Fulton County News of McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania seems to have missed the entire point of Esperanto in a June 29, 1911 piece titled “Against Esperanto.” One of the general requirements of suggested for an international language in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was that the language should be more easily learnt than any of the national languages. This rules Klingon right out.

But the Fulton County News made the claim that

time is value, and the time employed by an English-speaking person in learning Esperanto might be better employed in learning French or German or both.

The effort needed to learn Esperanto is pretty minimal, particularly when you compare it to German, a language with declensions, conjugations, and a surprising number of plural forms. A year’s study of German is pretty minimal. A year of French is somewhat better, but will still leave you fairly stranded in Paris. You could master Esperanto in a year.

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Neue Galerie - Too Small for the Price

You can take a picture of the
outside of the building, of course

Visiting museums in New York is a pricey proposition. Every time you walk in the door of one, it seems you’re shelling out another twenty bucks. Generally, I think you’re getting some value for this. I don’t begrudge the Frick Museum its admittance fees, it’s a stunning collection.

But yesterday, I visited the Neue Galerie, which I wasn’t even aware of the previous time I visited New York (it opened in 2001, but gained a lot of attention when Ronald S. Lauder bought the Klimt pairing, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer). One nice thing about the Neue Galerie was that when I saw this and four other Klimts at the LA County Museum of Art, the crowds were so large that it was impossible to appreciate the paintings. This was shortly after the paintings were returned to their proper owner, Maria Altmann. (The Austrian government had forced Altmann’s uncle, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, to deposit the paintings in the Austrian national museum during the Nazi era, but they did not manage to get him to actually donate the paintings.)

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You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

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