Alice Vanderbilt Morris
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alice Vanderbilt Morris (1874-1950), born Alice Vanderbilt Shepard, was the daughter of Elliot Fitch Shepard (1833-1893) and Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt (1845-1924). In 1895 she married Dave Hennen Morris (1872-1944), who later became the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium.
She attended the Radcliffe College of Harvard University. She was an honorary member of the Phi Beta Kappa society. She also received an honorary doctorate in Literary Science from Syracuse University "as special recognition of the field of study that you have made your own, the field of the international auxiliary language." She was Vice President of the World Service Council of the YWCA USA.
From her youth, Morris was troubled by ill health and was forced to spend much of her time on a sofa. This illness may have led to what was probably the most extensive linguistic research undertaken to date. During her stay at a clinic, Morris found a brochure on the artificial language Esperanto. She became interested in the idea of a neutral auxiliary language that could facilitate communication among diverse groups of people. Frederick Gardner Cottrell, later a well-known American chemist, persuaded Morris to tackle the problem of an auxiliary language, but objectively and scientifically.
In 1924, Morris and her husband founded the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). Morris had studied Esperanto, so the neutrality of IALA was often a dilemma for her. Nevertheless, she succeeded in remaining neutral. In 1945, she co-authored with Mary C. Bray the General Report of IALA. Morris was actively involved in the association – and remained its honorary Secretary – for the rest of her life.
Morris died in 1950 in New York. She was 75. About six months later, the Interlingua-English Dictionary was published, presenting to the world her life's work, Interlingua.
In 1999, Julia S. Falk of Michigan State University published the book Women, Language and Linguistics – Three American Stories from the First Half of the Twentieth Century (320 pp.). The women portrayed were Gladys Amanda Reichard, E. Adelaide Hahn, and Alice Vanderbilt Morris.
[edit] References
- Adapted from Morris's biography at Interlingua 2001: Communication Sin Frontieras Durante 50 Annos
- Additional information from Interlingua Wikipedia article Alice Vanderbilt Morris
[edit] External links
- Oil Portrait of Alice as a girl of 13, painted by John Singer Sargent
- Oil Portrait of her mother Margaret, also painted by Sargent
- Bust of her father Elliot, sculpted by John Adams Quincy Ward
