The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-12-03
ESPERANTO SAID ID
 BE LOOKING UP The New York Society Has a Home of Its
 Own. CLASS FOR BEGINNERS Light Chat aud Serious Talk in the New
 Language.
CLASS FOR BEGINNERS


 own at 80 East One Hundred and Six teenth street it's members have assun- ed an air of dignity quite different from the apologetic manner in which they explained last season that they were gathering in turn at one anoth- CTS apartments, With growth comes, of course, some natural feeling of ela- tion, for that this society is becoming 1 larger is evident to the visitor who makes his way to it's room any Friday evening.
 The older members get there first, about 8 o'clock, in order to Did the stranger welcome and to congratulate the newer members on their sustained interest in Esperanto The room is , large and three classes can be held in it at the same time; the adopts who converse more or less fiuently in the language on any subject that interests them for the moment, the learners who receive instruction from one of the ex- perienced, and the group of newcomers, sometimes large and sometimes small, who are rounded up by another ex- | perienced member and to whom are ex- plained the most elementary rules of Esperanto.
 The newcomers hear something like this;
 1 Esperanto is an artificial language invented twenty years ago by a Dr. zamenhof of Warsaw, Russian Poland I It Is intended for an auxiliary medium and in no way expected by it's adher- ents to drive out existing languages | Its principal advantage Is it's simplici- l ty, really remarkable feature, for the grammar may be learned in an hour easily. All nouns end in o, adjectlves in a, adverbs in e, and these endings are attached to the same root to ex- | press ideas which belong properly to that root. For instance, patro, a father; patra, fatherly; patre, in a fatherly manner. Laboro, work labora, labor ions; lahore, elaborately. Verbs have simple ending which change only for tense and mood, and not for number or person and" and so on.
 Few strangers leave during this little l Introduction. Occasionally an individual rises awkwardly from his chair and walks on tiptoe flo the door, very slow ly, but is heard scuttling rapidly down the passage once outside the portal.
 Perhaps he has made mistake about Esperanto. Maybe he expected to hear a disquisition on some medical subject or came primed for magic lantern views
 Indeed one young man in evening dress and an undershot jaw, who was escorting a pretty girl under large red hat, seemed to resent not hearing ' the band play after both visitors had Istood around wonderlngly for few minutes, but it developed In short or der that the pair had mistaken the room of the Esperanto society for a newly opened dance hall. The girl un- der the large red hat made a distinct i ly disrespectful remark about the in- : ternational auxiliary language when 1 the thing was explained, and she Is moi : expected to become an applicant for ) membership of the club at any tifne The learners class Is a very serious affair. The students have been work ing their way through an exercise book ) at home and familiarlzing themselves with the vocabulary--the Esperanto dictionary in it's skeleton form contains less than 1900 root words--and their mistakes have given them much un. easiness.
 , The instructor shows gently where : these mistakes might have been avoid. ed with a little more care, and aftel some primitive sentences containing home truths and interesting news items, such as: "A lion is ferociou,
 animal" T read, you read, he reads } we all read" q am stronger than you l but your bread is fresher than mine, have been done into stylish Esperant, { translation in the other direction 1! [ taken up and a book of short stories } l in Esperanto is turned into Englisl at sight, with more or less accuracy
 according to the capabllity or languag,
 sense of the student.
 Almost invariably one of these be ginners has a suggestion for the i'm.
 provement of the language, and hert the tact of the instructor comes in. Ht knows, from his own experience, that 1 the first steps in Esperanto, because O : it's simplicity as a whole, suggest tt the thinking student what seems to bt : a more direct translation of a single idea, plan which if admitted would spoil the principle scheme
 He therefore assures the eager pro. poser that suggestions for the i'm lprovement of Esperanto are like meas les in childhood. We all have them feel better than before after they have disappeared, are usually immune I against the same trouble henceforward, and become converts to what the Els. perantists poetically call 'the untouch- ahleness of the fundament"
 This learners class is taken in hand by different adept each Friday, not because variety of method of in struction is considered good thing but because the adept does not want to be absent all the time from the con- versation group, which is made up oi the old members, the officers and tht quicker students
 This set shows Esperanto at it's best There is no formality; smoking is in- dulged in, to which the ladies don't object, and the visitor who is there simply to look on cannot fail to be in- terested.
 Esperanto is distinctly musical lan- guage when spoken freely and correct ily. The best conversationalist seems to be the president of the society, Dr
 Max Talmey. who has further signal ized himself by publishing an Esper. anto grammar, though, as a book re- viewer remarked recently, the day
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