esperanto ^&$&$-$p 1991(3) [ Making News This Issue Membership ELNA now has more than a thousand members. But this does not solve all our membership problems. Mike Donohoo, Director of theCentral Office, talks about how you can help. See Page 5 And Now, The News The UniversalaEsperanto-Asocio is now providing information for external use. For your enjoyment and possible use, we provide English translations of some items. See Pages 7-8 Letters, We Get Letters Greetings from Haiti ... pen-pals from the USSR ... a request for information from Poland ... the Intermountain Con- ference ... the Catholic Church and Es- peranto ... a national Esperanto organi- zation in Albania... all in the letter col- umn! See Pages 11-12 In This Issue: Universala Esperanto-Asocio 2 An Oasis in Esperanto-Land 9 Pen-pals from Eleven Countries on Three Continents 15 And Much, Much More to Delight and Inform You! Agoj de ELNA Proponoj Akceptitaj de la Estraro La Estraro de ELNA lastatempe akceptis la jenajn proponojn: (1) La Estraro de ELNA rajtigas la Centran Oficejon elspezi ĝis $500 dum la fiska jaro 1991 por eldoni kaj dissendi unupaĝan informilon por disdonado ĉe paroladoj pri Esperanto, kondiĉe, ke tiu informilo estu provizita al kluboj kaj unuopuloj laŭ la jenaj kondiĉoj: (1) Neniu grupo aŭ unuopulo rajtas ricevi, senkoste, aron da informiloj pli ol unu fojon en la jaro; (2) Skribita peto devas veni al la Centra Oficejo kun la datoj de la okazo kaj sufiĉe da detaloj por certigi, ke la celoj de la okazo ne kontraŭas la celojn de ELNA laŭ ties Statuto; (3) Lapetinta grupo aŭ unuopulo devas pagi la sendokoston. (2) (a) ELNA aperigu specialan faldfolio-serion, konsistantan el ses titoloj, kiuj estos: "Esperanto Litera- ture", "The Artificial Language Move- ment", "History of the World Esperanto Movement", "World Language Problem Today", "Is There an Esperanto Cul- ture?" kaj "Zamenhof: Creator of Espe- ranto"; (b) Cis la fino de la unua plena kalendara jaro post apero de ĉiuj faldfolioj, ELNA vendu la serion al daŭrigota sur paĝo 15 V o T E /-\ Our goal for 1991 1150 - '-_ ELNA membership 1990 1031 - '— 1000 ELNA membership 1989 931 - '- ELNA membership 1988 778 " ■"* ELNA membership 1987 572 - '- ~500 Membership 1008 on April 9! " < &u r° E D T O R I A L UNIVERSALA = WORLD Some 32 years ago I really started digging into Esperanto, and by the sum- mer of 1959 I felt confident enough to write a letter (in English!) and send a check for $4, generously provided by my parents, to the only real address that I could find, the one at Eendrachtsweg 7 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, for mem- bership in the organization known as the Universala Esperanto-Asocio. Shortly thereafter, I was drafted to go off to Denmark for six months as an American Field Service exchange student. In Copenhagen my mail caught up with me—some seven issues of the magazine Esperanto and the first part of the 1959 Jarlibro. This was my first introduction to real Esperanto, as opposed to the care- fully manufactured textbook excercises. I spent hours going over those seven magazines, paragraph by paragraph, reading them out loud to myself over and over again until I felt absolutely sure of their meaning. In a very real sense, I finally succeeded in learning Esperanto from the pages of UEA's magazine with the, for me, very appropriate name. Esperanto opened a whole world to me. Previously, the language had been just that—de Beaufront's nura lingvo. Now I learned, not only the words and syntactic constructions, but also the de- tails of the Esperanto movement and its associated culture. I learned about World Esperanto Congresses (enthusiasm was high for the forthcoming one—"forth- coming" in the pages of the magazine; it was already underway when I reached Denmark—in Warsaw, Poland). I learned about the existence of books— not textbooks!—in Esperanto, and for the next two years, unable to afford any, I salivated over ads for Esperanto Antologio and Julio Baghy's Sonĝe sub pomarbo, I learned about radio broad- casts inEsperanto.and almost jumped for joy the night I first heard, through a cloud of static, the North Vietnamese ambassa- dor to Moscow being interviewed in Es- peranto on Radio Warsaw. From the Jarlibro I learned of the far-flung net- work of delegates in some sixty different countries, and I actually went and visited the one in Randers, the town in which I was living, an elderly lady named Acta Nielsen. I learned the names of the mov- ers and shakers of the international Espe- ranto movement—UEA President Giorgio Canuto, Vice-President (later to become President) Hideo Yagi (of dis- tant, exotic Japan!), General Secretary Ivo Lapenna. I learned... The Esperanto movement has its own very loose, often unofficial, Table of Or- ganization. There are the local Esperanto groups, the ones that hold meetings every month (in many places throughout the world, every week); some countries have fewer—Israel has three—and some have more—there are two or three dozen in the United States, 162 in little Hungary. Above the local groups, and some- times—though not in theUnited States— officially associated with them, are the national organizations such as ELNA. And over and above ELNA, attempting to coordinate the international Esperanto movement, is the Universala Esperanto- Asocio, the World Esperanto Associa- tion, officially associated with some fifty of the world's seventy national Espe- ranto organizations. Those who are interested in the history of UEA should read Mark Fettes's prize- winning essay on the subject; it was printed in the January, 1991, issue of Fonto. In short, UEA was founded by a Swiss teen-ager, Hector Hodler, more than 80 years ago, as a service organiza- tion for individual Esperanto speakers. For various political and financial rea- sons it became, as well, a forum for the various national Esperanto associations more than 60 years ago. Today it fulfills, in my opinion, three major functions: it is the primary lobbyist for Esperanto in the international community; it continues to serve as a forum for discussion and reso- lution of problems in the international Esperanto movement; and it functions as a center from which isolated Esperan- tists—those like myself who had no con- tact with their national Esperanto move- ment, and more particularly those who come from parts of the world where there is no local or national mo vement—can be initiated into the international Esperanto movement. In this last category, UEA has scored a few notable successes in recent years, among them its support for Hans Bakker's almost single-handed attempt to introduce Esperanto into Africa, wi!h great success (the first African Esperanto Congress was held in Togoland at the end of 1990), and its sponsorship of Joachim Werdin's teaching excursions into Asia, with the resultant creation of new Espe- ranto organizations in at least Malaysia, Nepal and Singapore. As you can see from the above, UEA plays a very different role in the Espe- ranto movement than does ELNA. ELNA supports theprornotion and teach- ing of Esperanto in the United States; UEA operates on a worldwide scale. Esperanto USA, though it does attempt to keep ELNA members abreast of some Esperanto activities outside the U.S., must dedicate most of its space to the Esperanto movement here at home; Esperanto's attention is more wide-rang- ing. Because many of ELNA's members are new Esperantists, much of Esperanto U.S.A. is inEnglish; becmse. Esperanto's readership is scattered out over a hundred countries, the magazine must be entirely in Esperanto. My reason for mentioning all this is to let you know the advantages of belonging to UEA as well as to ELNA. And the advantages go both ways. UEA has two sorts of members, associate (members of associated national organizations who do not pay dues to UEA) and individual (those who pay dues to UEA). Over the last year, a small increase in individual memberships has been far more than off- set by a drastic decrease—crash, if you prefer—in associate memberships, due mainly to economic conditions in Poland and Czechoslovakia. UEA now has a campaign underway to increase the num- ber of individual members to ten thou- sand. Because of UEA's dues structure, this relatively modest increase would more than solve the financial problems created by the (hopefully temporary) loss of several thousand associate members. If you are not yet a member of UEA, I hope that what I've written above will convince you to at least consider the advantages of joining. Don Harlow 2 esperanto/usal99l(3) The Mark Twain Boyhood Home As- sociates newsletter The Fence Painter (Summer, 1990) reports Ron Glossop's gift of a copy of the comic-book version of Tom Sawyer in Esperanto (see EUS A 1990(6), "Regional Reports") in an ar- ticle "Tom Sawyer in Esperanto." The article gives some details on Esperanto's history, structure, and current use. It also includes a reproduction of the cover of the Esperanto booklet, (sent by Humphrey Tonkin) "Esperanto is an ethic," says June K. Fritz in a letter to the Lincoln, NE, Star (Jan. 7,1991). Ms. Fritz responds to the notorious Chicago article about Espe- ranto and invites everyone to look into Esperanto by checking the Richardson book out of their local library, (sent by June K. Fritz) Henrietta Kroll responds to the AP- distributed article about Esperanto and the MLA in a letter to the LeMars, IA, Daily Sentinel (Jan. 21,1991). Ms. Kroll defends Esperanto, corrects the original article's botched example of Esperanto, and invites anyone interested in the lan- guage to contact her. (sent by HenriettaL. Kroll) Turkey has now repealed a law ban- ning speech in languages other than "the official, primary languages of countries recognised by Turkey." According to The Economist (Feb. 9, 1991), the pur- pose of this law "was not to encourage police raids on classes in Esperanto" but to suppress the identity of the Kurdish people. Could this be the reason for the recent foundation of an Anatolian Espe- ranto Association? (noted by David R. Brown) Unicode, a new super-ASCII, is de- scribed as "an Esperanto for the electron- ics age" by Johanna Ambrosio of Computerworld (Feb. 25, 1991). Ambrosio, however, expresses a hope that Unicode "has more success than the ill-fated Esperanto language." (sent by David R. Brown) "Computers Gain New Respect as Translators," Warren E. Leary informs us in the New York, NY, Times (March 5, 1991). The article devotes much space to the "interlingual" approach to machine translation, in which "all languages are considered modules or spokes of a wheel that address a hub, which contains acom- mon, central set of meanings—kind of an Esperanto for machine translation—be- fore being translated into one another." This idea is presented as a recent devel- opment of American high-tech, and no mention is made of, for instance, BSO's Distributed Language Translation sys- tem, which has been in development in The Netherlands for almost a decade now and uses the real Esperanto as its interlingual hub... (provided by John Champlin) Peter Fuhrman, in an article in Forbes (Mar. 18,1991), describes a harmonized set of rules governing public securities in all major econom ies, now under develop- ment, as "accounting's equivalent of Es- peranto." In fact, he likes the metaphor so much that he titles his article "Esperanto for accountants." (sent by John Massey) During a showing of the British com- edy series "Home, Sweet Home" in Philadelphia (last week of March, 1991), a character in a situation in which people of different cultural backgrounds and languages are trying to communicate suggests: "Why not have us all speak together in Esperanto?" The ironic reply is: "Then who would be the foreigners?" (reported by Mubarak Anwar Amar) During an episode of 'Twin Peaks" (April 4,1991), David Lynch, the direc- tor, made a cameo appearance as an FBI agent. Seeing an attractive waitress in a local diner, he remarked to his compan- ion that he wished he could speak French. He nevertheless was going to approach her and try some "counter Esperanto." (reported by David R. Brown) An article by Arlyn Kerr in the Douglass Alumnae Bulletin (Winter, 1991) of Rutgers University mentions that a previous knowledge of Esperanto made the learning of Spanish much easier for Kerr and her husband, (sent by Arlyn Kerr) Peter M. Benton, discussing machine translation in "The Multilingual Edge" in Byte magazine (Mar. 1991), includes a short description of the Dutch firm BSO's Distributed Language Transla- tion system, which "uses Esperanto as its interlingua. The Esperanto language was invented in the late 1800s for scientific discourse." (thanks to Jeff Kunce) The bulletin Something Extra (Vol. 1 No. 25) of the Manhattan District of the I.R.S. alerts employees to the existence of the Esperanto Society of New York and its address, and directs them to Mar- tin Roth in theExamination Divison, who has information about the free postal course, (sent by Rochelle Grossman) Joel Brozovsky, who works as an edi- tor at Oomoto headquarters in Japan, has sent us information about several refer- ences to Esperanto in two English-lan- guage newspapers in Japan. The Japan Times published the notorious Chicago Tribune-AP article (Jan. 3,1991), which encouraged a spirited defense of Espe- ranto from Fukuzo Hosokawa of Takamatsu in the same newspaper (Jan. 20,1991).TheMamiĉ/Daz7yJVeH'.s(Nov. 3, 1990), in an article on Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen, mentions the Esperanto translation (which it incor- rectly suggests was inspired by the En- glish translation). And th&Mainiĉi Daily News (Jan. 30, 1991) and The Japan Times (Jan. 16, 1991), in two separate articles about the Servas organization, both mention that the name comes from Esperanto. esperanto/usa 1991(3) 3 <$ KM F&KhS IR&P€>BT©