Esperanto: Hearings before the Committee on Education

Esperanto: Hearings before the
Committee on Education

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Esperanto: Hearings before the
Committee on
Education, by Richard Bartholdt and A. Christen This eBook is for the
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Title: Esperanto: Hearings before the Committee on Education
Author: Richard Bartholdt and A. Christen
Release Date: August 4, 2005 [EBook #16432]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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ESPERANTO: HEARINGS BEFORE ***

Produced by David Starner, William Patterson and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

The Esperanto alphabet contains 28 characters. These are the characters
of English, but with "q", "w", "x", and "y" removed, and six diacritical
letters added. The diacritical letters are "c", "g", "h", "j" and "s" with
circumflexes (or "hats", as Esperantists fondly call them), and "u" with
a breve. Zamenhof himself suggested that where the diacritical letters
caused difficulty, one could instead use "ch", "gh", "hh", "jh", "sh" and
"u". A plain ASCII file is one such place; there are no ASCII codes for
Esperanto's special letters.
However, there are two problems with Zamenhof's "h-method". There
is no difference between "u" and "u" with a breve, and there is no way
to determine (without prior knowledge of the word(s) involved, and
sometimes a bit of context) whether an "h" following one of those other
five letters is really the second half of a diacritical pair, or just an "h"
that happened to find itself next to one of them. Consequently other,
unambiguous, methods have been used over the years. One is the
"x-method", which uses the digraphs "cx", "gx", "hx", "jx", "sx" and
"ux" to represent the special letters. There is no ambiguity because the
letter "x" is not an Esperanto letter, and each diacritical letter has a
unique transliteration. This is the method used in the ASCII versions of
this Project Gutenberg e-text.
However, in the discussion of the name "Washington", "W" and "sh"
were indeed used in the original document. "Esparanto" and "flexbility"
were also found in the original document and retained, along with a
"than" where a "then" was probably intended.
In addition, the 7-bit ASCII version of this book uses the German "-e"
convention to represent characters with umlauts. The 8-bit ASCII
version uses the ISO-8859-1 character set to represent these German
and Volapük characters. The HTML version uses Unicode and
therefore displays properly all the characters for the languages...
including Esperanto!
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ESPERANTO =========
HEARINGS BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES SIXTY-THIRD CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
ON
H. RES. 415 A RESOLUTION PROVIDING FOR THE STUDY OF
ESPERANTO AS AN AUXILIARY LANGUAGE
========
STATEMENTS OF
HON. RICHARD BARTHOLDT A REPRESENTATIVE FROM THE
STATE OF MISSOURI
AND
PROF. A. CHRISTEN
------------ MARCH 17, 1914 ------------
WASHINGTON GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 1914

COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION.
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SIXTY-THIRD CONGRESS.
DUDLEY M. HUGHES, Georgia, Chairman.
WILLIAM W. RUCKER, Missouri. JAMES F. BURKE, Pennsylvania.
ROBERT L. DOUGHTON, North Carolina. CALEB POWERS,
Kentucky. JOHN W. ABERCROMBIE, Alabama. HORACE M.
TOWNER, Iowa. J. THOMPSON BAKER, New Jersey. EDMUND
PLATT, New York. JOHN R. CLANCY, New York. ALLEN T.

TREADWAY, Massachusetts. THOMAS C. THACHER,
Massachusetts. SIMEON D. FESS, Ohio. STEPHEN A. HOXWORTH,
Illinois. ARTHUR R. RUPLEY, Pennsylvania.
James L. Fort, Clerk.

ESPERANTO.
---------
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION,
Tuesday, March 17, 1914
The committee this day met, Hon. Dudley M. Hughes (chairman)
presiding.
STATEMENT OF HON. RICHARD BARTHOLDT, A
REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF
MISSOURI.
Mr. BARTHOLDT. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, I do not wish to
occupy your time, for the reason that I can be here almost any time,
while Prof. Christen has made a special trip from New York for this
purpose, and I should like to give him all the time you can afford to
devote to this bill.
I merely wish to say, in explanation, that I have not, as you will notice,
introduced this bill by request; I have assumed responsibility for it
personally because I thoroughly believe in it. I first introduced the bill
in the shape of a request to the Committee on Education to investigate
the subject; that is, as to the practicability and advisability of
introducing Esperanto as an auxiliary language in the public schools.
That resolution was referred to the Committee on Rules and, of course,
I could not get any action in that committee, and for that reason I
introduced the bill in its present form, which merely provides that
Esperanto be taught as a part of the course of study in the schools of
Washington, this being the only jurisdiction