Recently, I have been reading Privat’s Historio de La Lingvo Esperanto: 1900-1927. It has a lot of fascinating material on the explosive growth of the movement in the early twentieth century.
One thing that amazes me is this: in the early years, Esperanto was essentially a written language only. There were so few Esperanto speakers, they had so little access to the internet and even telephones, and they were so spread out, that they never had anyone to speak it with. People speaking Esperanto was so novel that major journals in the movement ran stories about the encounters.
I was able to track down this story from L’Espérantiste (Vol. 35, November 1900) via the National Library of France’s digital library program Gallica. Thanks to the Esperantaj Familioj group for their help finding it. The scans of the relevant pages are included below for educational and research purposes.
Spoken esperanto. – We have already cited many examples of Esperanto’s perfect applicability for spoken use; but we’ll never have too many examples of this sort of thing.
Read this!
Mr. Charles Lambert, a lecturer at the University of Dijon, wrote to Mr. Méray, a professor at the same university, a letter from which we extract the following report:
On the last Saturday of September, a stranger gave me a visiting card bearing the following1: «Dokotoro Krikortz, kuracisto, demandas ĉu vi volas permesi al li viziton.»
I accepted him dutifully; but because I had never spoken Esperanto aloud and tembled at the thought of speaking at great length, I asked him (in Esperanto) which other languages he spoke. He responded: “I am a Swede, from Stockholm, so I speak Swedish. I can get myself out of a tough spot in German; but I would rather not speak that language. Regarding French, I can read it but I’ve never spoken it. We might as well continue in Esperanto.”
We spent the rest of the day together, from two in the afternoon to ten in the evening. We visited Dijon, its monuments, its museum. We ate dinner together, as brothers, and at the hotel I even served as the doctor’s translator.
We talked about everything: trips, spas, Sweden, the snow in Lappland, politics, teaching, photography, biking, etc. Even though the sounds of Swedish differ from those of French, I was able to hear and understand everything Mr. Krikortz said to me. I was so surprized by this that I mentioned it to him; I marvelled at the ease with which I spoke Esperanto. Certainly, I didn’t always find the right word, because I had no experience whatsoever with spoken Esperanto, but I could always make myself understood.
The next day, I was again with the doctor at the train station. He showed me his bicycle and explained how it worked in Esperanto. A few curious people watched us and marveled. When Krikortz was getting onboard, we said a friendly goodbye, happy for meeting that we owed to Esperanto. As the train took the doctor to his brother in Broubon-Lancy, I thought about how the conversational practice of the day before had greatly improved my use of Esperanto and how I could speak it without the slightly difficulty or effort.
In another news, Mr. Fréhis wrote to us that he also received a visit from Mr. Krikortz in Paris and spoke with him fluently in Esperanto only.
Finally, Mr. Gabriel Chavet reports that he had a visit from Captain Pavlovskij (from Chotska Russia): the conversation in our wonderful language, which Mr. Pavlovskij speaks perfectly, was quite comprehensible.
We’re glad that others among us have tried, in their turn, the experiment which Mr. Postnikov did last year and which we reported in the magazine. We were so satisfied with the result that, being heavily burdened with work, we were unable go to Paris to meet the foreign friends. We are proud to report these new examples and ask: where are similar stories from the other languages which present themselves as “international”!
“Dr. Krikortz, medical doctor, asks if you would be willing to permit him a visit.” ↩︎
Published: Apr 2, 2026 @ 20:52.
Last Modified: Apr 2, 2026 @ 22:21.
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