Monday, August 31, 2015

Esperanto Goes to War, Almost

Make Esperanto, Not War
One of the great promises of Esperanto is that it is significantly easier to learn than any national language (and, for that matter, many constructed languages). The only problem is that, easy or hard, a language doesn’t have much utility if you’ve no one to speak it to. (Personally, I expend some effort just so I can have a change to speak Esperanto with people.) The problem with this (as my own experience has demonstrated) is that you need someone else to have learned it, or you’re just babbling.

French, on the other hand, is fairly difficult language. There are tougher, but given the disconnect between pronunciation and spelling in French, and a good number of verbs which though not irregular, might be termed “idiosyncratic,” teaching the American troops French probably wasn’t high on the list of things to do in 1917. Writing to the the New-York Tribune, in a letter they published on August 31, 1917, James McKirdy of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania had another idea. Why not Esperanto?



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Sunday, August 30, 2015

A Temperance Beverage for Esperantists?

Elbe nur malgranda glaso.
The Methodist weekly Zion’s Herald gave a somewhat snarky view of Esperanto in their issue of August 30, 1905. This was the magazine’s first encounter with Esperanto (they would go on to publish a few more articles over the next few years), occasioned by the first Universala Kongreso. The first few congresses were great opportunities for publicizing the Esperanto movement. This had been done before (by the Volapük movement), but no one had done it in the sixteen years following the last of the Volapük congresses.[1]

Esperanto had taken its time to grow slowly over the previous eighteen years, including an influx of former Volapük speakers as the Volapük movement crumbled. It’s not clear why it took until 1905 for the Esperanto movement to hold its first congress, although in 1891 (four years after the introduction of Esperanto) it hadn’t gone nearly as far as Volapük had in the same number of years. Volapük’s rise and fall encompasses a mere nine years; during the first nine years of Esperanto, it was still fairly obscure.



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Saturday, August 29, 2015

The Esperantist Agricultural Expert

Li revas pri bienoj kaj Esperanto.
The Washington D. C. school board was probably well rehearsed on reasons why not to introduce Esperanto into the curriculum by 1914 when Richard Bartholdt, Representative from Louisiana, suggested that Congressional intervention might be the way to go. Their first encounter with the idea seems to be when Sara Crafts, a noted social reformer (and early Esperantis), attempted this in 1908. Even the students got involved with petitioning the school board to teach Esperanto in 1913.

With the suggestion raised in 1908, 1913, and 1914, the big missing number is 1910. You would think that with the Universala Kongreso in Washington D. C. in 1910 that local Esperantists would have been emboldened to bring up the idea once again. And you would think right. In August 1910 (presumably as part of the preparations for the 1910/11 school year), the Washington D.C. school board made their second evaluation of Esperanto in the public schools.



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Friday, August 28, 2015

An Esperanto Enthusiast in Ohio

Entusiasmo estas bona!
There were a series of letters to the Omaha Daily Bee in August 1915 debating the relative merits of Esperanto and a language that was championed and invented by one D. C. John, Monoglott. Though Mr. John said that he was “trying to prepare a Monoglott grammar,” (the language is referred to both as “Monoglott” and “Monoglot”; I’ve decided to use the version ending in two t’s) I have found no evidence that any such document was ever published. Many proposed international language projects turn out to be vaporware, with no final product ever seen. This is common and I continue to see evidence that people loudly announce language projects and then quietly slip out of view.[1]

It does not surprise me that no evidence exists for Mr. John’s Monoglott project beyond a few letters to the Omaha Daily Bee. On August 28, 1915, one more correspondent came into this conversation held in the Bee’s “Letter Box” column. It’s signed by James G. Hayden, who was eager to rebut the question of Monoglott as an Esperantist. Hayden left little trace of his activity in Esperanto, but there was sufficient information with which to identify him.



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Thursday, August 27, 2015

The Long Plan for 1915

Personally, I want to know how
many members they had.
In 1912, the committee working on the Pan-American Esperanto Congress had no idea that their efforts would also incorporate the eleventh Universala Kongreso, since their hopes for another Esperanto congress in the United States weren’t receiving an enthusiastic response. Really no surprise, given that 1910 Universala Kongreso in Washington, D.C. was the second smallest ever (with only 357 participants), with the last time the a congress held in Europe had fewer than 1,000 participants was right before World War II (preceding an eight-year gap). The United States probably isn’t ruled out of hosting a congress, but it’s my guess that the UEA would want to see that 1,000 American participants were likely first.

In 1912, the Esperantists who met in Oakland were just planning the eighth national congress of the Esperanto Association of North America. The hopes of the Universala Kongreso returning to the United States had already been dashed with Edinburgh, Scotland chosen as the site of the 1915 Universala Kongreso. And that all changed in March 1915, with little time to turn this from a national congress to an international one.

In a way, as the smallest Universala Kongreso ever (and I doubt there will ever be a smaller one), the 1915 Kongreso really was a national congress with a bit of international tacked on. But they didn’t know that in 1912. They were just planning the EANA congress. The San Francisco Call ran an article announcing their meeting on August 27, 1912.

ESPERANTO ADVOCATES WILL MEET THURSDAY
OAKLAND, Aug. 26.—The monthly meeting of the Oakland branch of the Universal Esperanto association will be held in the Oakland high school Thursday evening. Papers will be read by Miss Emma Rathgeb, William T. Drake, Miss E. Stevens and Miss Alice Lercher. Edward Irving will read a paper on the value of Esperanto to science. A short talk will be given by L. H. Gorham, who will tell of the plans of the society, including the pan-American congress of Esperantists in San Francisco in 1915.
The date in question for the meeting was September 30, as the 27th was a Monday in 1915. That’s an awfully long lead-up to a convention that was only going to be a couple hundred people at best. It’s clear that in that era that was the size of the national congresses in the United States. So why three years in the planning? Couldn’t this have been handled in about a year or less?

Sadly, there’s not much value in reading a paper on the importance of Esperanto to science to a bunch of Esperanto supporters. Really, it’s the scientists that you need to convince. In any case, this seemed to be pretty standard for a meeting of the Oakland Esperanto Society, and the San Francisco Call was pretty good about letting the public know of their events.
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Wednesday, August 26, 2015

The Esperantists Hold a Congress

Still not taken seriously
There is a tendency in the early reports about Esperanto to continually emphasize the “newness” of the language, even as it it approached twenty years since it had been initially published. I keep coming back to the thought that the final Volapük congress took place only about nine years after Schleyer published that language, while there were eighteen years between the Unua Libro, the first book on Esperanto (not that it was called that at the time) and the first World Esperanto Congress (which was called by its participants the Universala Kongreso). And yet, when the Minneapolis Journal wrote about the first Universala Kongreso, they felt obligated to describe Esperanto as “the new tongue.”

The first Universala Kongreso occurred in Paris from 7th to the 12th of August 1905 in Boulogne-sur-Mer, with 688 participants.[1] It took some time for the news to go from Paris to Minneapolis, although there was a wire services article[2] which appeared on August 13, 1905 which preceded it. The earlier article was probably the source for this August 26 article.

This one combines a report of the congress with some thoughts about Esperanto, sort of giving us the bigger picture. Not just the congress, but also the importance of the congress.

The New Tongue.
When the papers announced a year or more ago, that the universal language “Esperanto” had been formulated, in the hope of undoing the mischief caused by the tower of Babel, people smiled and then forgot all about it. That is, most of them smiled and forgot. The rest of them began to study Esperanto. The result was that a congress of Esperantists has just been held in France, with delegates attending from France, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, Russia, Germany, Sweden and Canada. Speeches were made in Esperanto, everybody talked in Esperanto, and much to the pleasure of all concerted, everybody could talk with his neighbor, no matter what his nationality and native tongue. Esperanto, evidently, must be taken seriously.
While the Journal felt that Esperanto must be taken seriously, in the century since that sentiment was uttered, it’s unfortunately been viewed more as the exception than the rule. I just encountered someone who, after two months of study, was able to translate my Esperanto into English for people who were just starting out. Yes, Esperanto should be taken seriously.

But the Journal is off by a few years when it says that “the papers announced a year or more ago that the universal language ‘Esperanto’ had been formulated,” unless by “or more” we can understand it to mean “eighteen years prior.” Several newspapers in the United States wrote about Esperanto less than a decade after its publication, with a few even writing about Esperanto in 1887, the year of its publication.

People did seem to smile and forget. There seemed to be a need to continually re-introduce Esperanto, reminding us that someone had proposed the language, whether that person was a Spaniard, or had spent fifteen years in a Polish prison.[3] More than a century has passed since that initial gathering of people who could speak to his or her neighbor.

Typical of early twentieth-century writing, the Journal’s “his” is quite inaccurate. The Esperanto Wikipedia article on the “Unua Universala Kongreso de Esperanto” has a photograph of congress participants. The first row of the photograph has twenty-two people in it, all but three of whom are women (and there are other women in the photograph). In the center, amongst the women is Dr. Zamenhof, and two seats away from him appears to be Émile Boirac, who chaired the congress. The person I’m most curious about is the man on the right edge of the photograph. With no chair available for him, but clearly wanting to be in the front row, he is reclining in front of three women.


  1. There’s an excellent summary at the Esperanto Wikipedia entry UK 1905.  ↩
  2. Other matters prevented me from getting to it, which is a shame, because I skipped it in 2014 intending to write it up in 2015 (the 110th anniversary). I’ll slip it in out of date.  ↩
  3. Zamenhof was twenty-seven when he published Esperanto. Do the math.  ↩

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Sunday, August 23, 2015

An Esperanto Congress at a Time of War

How international
was it really?
August 23, 1915 was the opening day of the eleventh World Esperanto Congress, the Universala Kongreso. It’s not wholly the fault of the San Francisco committee that it was the smallest on record (a mere 163 participants). After all, until the outbreak of WWI in August 1914, the plan had been to hold the 1915 Universala Kongreso in Edinburgh, Scotland. But there was a war on. Plans for the Kongreso don’t seem to have started until March 1915, although the committee actually had been working on this since 1915.

In 1915, the United States was still maintaining its neutrality in WWI, which at that point wasn’t per se a “world war” (the term only came into use after the end of WWII, renaming the earlier war; personally, I lean to the view that there was a cease-fire of about twenty years within a single conflict). Although, one of the papers that covered the opening of the 1915 Kongreso, the Bemidji Daily Pioneer has a comic strip, Scoop, The Cub Reporter, on the same page as one of the articles about the Kongreso. In the strip, the characters are on a ship worrying about the potential for being struck by a torpedo. While the war in Europe was far from the waters Bemidji, Minnesota, it was clearly still on their minds.



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