SPX:What do you think is contributing to the decline in UEA membership? Do you know if national organizations are taking the same hit?

One thing I can say is that the UEA's website is very confusing and disorganized. I think it could use an overhaul.

Someone redesigned the UEA's website, but it was a volunteer, and my understanding is that with the time he was able to devote to it, the redesign was obsolete before it even launched. It's a topic that has recently been discussed in the "Esperanto news media", if you will.

I think that the decline in membership is not limited to the UEA, though it's mainly the UEA that people seem to be discussion internationally (I'm sure, however, that national organizations are having similar discussions).

I think that people no longer see the point of joining an organization. In the past you had to join an organization to "do" Esperanto - to meet people, to use the language, you kind of had to join something to make those connections. Now, with modern technologies, people can find each other directly, there's no need to join an organization. People don't see the point in paying an annual fee just to receive a monthly or bi-monthly bulletin that they might not enjoy.

I'm not currently a member of any Esperanto organization, as it happens. I was a member of the US association for a long time and then for a variety of reasons (laziness being just one) I didn't re-join this year. And the UEA - I have been a member on and off in the past, but I currently don't see a point in being a member. I don't feel that the UEA does a good job at making a case for why it is meaningful to join, and I know that there is a great deal of discussion going on within the UEA itself, regarding the reason for the declining membership, and what it can do to stop the slide.

If you feel like practicing your Esperanto, here's a somewhat old article on the decline in UEA members, and a more recent article on a decline in subscribers to the UEA's magazine.

The consensus among forward-thinking people is generally that Esperanto needs a paradigm shift. Large organizations with memberships and big bureaucracies and membership cards and annual dues and lists of "topical delegates" were the past, and we need to figure out what the future looks like. lernu.net (and ESF, the foundation that supports us) are among those discussing what this future might look like. We'll see how things shake out!

For the record - I do see a purpose for organizations like UEA, I'm not advocating that they completely disappear. But I think that they need to reinvent how they function and focus on a few core tasks that they do well, rather than trying to act as a central clearinghouse for the entire Esperanto world.

As a small example - they include lernu's activities and achievements in their annual report, although we have no link with them other than the fact that we are all involved with Esperanto. They do not fund us, and have never funded us; we have no administrative relationship. Why are we included in their report? I'm not sure. Perhaps they believe that they represent all Esperantists, so the accomplishments of any Esperanto group, in their view, may merit mention in their annual report (though they neglect to mention that UEA doesn't provide financial support to lernu, so any membership fees or donations sent to UEA will surely never filter down to this site).

erinja:
Someone redesigned the UEA's website, but it was a volunteer, and my understanding is that with the time he was able to devote to it, the redesign was obsolete before it even launched. It's a topic that has recently been discussed in the "Esperanto news media", if you will.

Thanks for the info. It will take me a while to translate that but what I do know is that the website needs some work. I didn't find it to be worthy of an international and long-standing organization like the UEA.

erinja:I think that people no longer see the point of joining an organization.

Call me sentimental, but I guess it's my natural inclination to join if only for historical reasons. I am aware of the UEA's role throughout history and the services it has provided for Esperantists over the decades.

This might sound a little strange considering we're using the Internet to have this discussion, but I sometimes regret the dominance of technology in our lives. It's a little overwhelming. I occasionally think it would be better to go back to more of a pen-and-paper analog way of living than to stay in the age of digital information overload.

erinja:If you feel like practicing your Esperanto, here's a somewhat old article on the decline in UEA members, and a more recent article on a decline in subscribers to the UEA's magazine.

I will get to work on that. . .

Wikipedia says the Idists have annual conventions similar to Esperanto's UKs that are attended by tens of people. (My words, not theirs. )

The ease by which one can find information about Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Solresol or any other constructed language on the web allows for easy experimentation and "kicking the tires" on a language, if you will. I was a member of a Klingon listserv until I dropped out because someone got pedantic about my translation of Changtze's famous story about how he dreamed he was a butterfly. (I translated "butterfly" as "flutter-worm," thinking that it would be a good image to use to convey a picture of this Terran beastie to an alien race with the vocabulary I had access to. A couple of regulars got on my case because I didn't substitute a canon Klingon animal. Maybe this is the way Klingons make you feel welcome, but if so it wasn't for me.)

One could easily go investigate Ido for a while, see how it compares to Novial, check out a couple of other languages and then participate in whichever community best holds their interest. Me, I made my choice a long time ago, and while I might go look at another language or two out of curiosity - something I would have had trouble doing pre-Internet - I dont see myself changing over from Esperanto to some other language.

creedelambard:I was a member of a Klingon listserv until I dropped out because someone got pedantic about my translation of Changtze's famous story about how he dreamed he was a butterfly. (I translated "butterfly" as "flutter-worm," thinking that it would be a good image to use to convey a picture of this Terran beastie to an alien race with the vocabulary I had access to. A couple of regulars got on my case because I didn't substitute a canon Klingon animal. Maybe this is the way Klingons make you feel welcome, but if so it wasn't for me.)

I've always wondered, what's the grammar like for Klingon?

creedelambard:One could easily go investigate Ido for a while, see how it compares to Novial, check out a couple of other languages and then participate in whichever community best holds their interest. Me, I made my choice a long time ago, and while I might go look at another language or two out of curiosity - something I would have had trouble doing pre-Internet - I dont see myself changing over from Esperanto to some other language.

I'm just not sure it would be worth it for me to study a language where the speakers aren't at least in the thousands. Maybe if there was nothing else available then I could get on board with a language that had several hundred speakers as long as the community was very active. But as far as I can tell, Esperanto is perfect: very interesting history, commendable philosophical underpinnings, and enough speakers for it to be of some actual practical use.

SPX:I've always wondered, what's the grammar like for Klingon?

Very strange. Intentionally so. The designer (Mark Okrand) set out to make it almost, but not quite, entirely unlike any other language with which an Earthling might be familiar, to paraphrase Douglas Adams. So the sound is very gutteral, the language is highly agglutinative, and word order is backwards from our point of view (most sentences run object-verb-subject rather than the typical English other way round).

Check out the Wikipedia article "Klingon language". It can give you a better overview than I can.

SPX:I'm just not sure it would be worth it for me to study a language where the speakers aren't at least in the thousands. Maybe if there was nothing else available then I could get on board with a language that had several hundred speakers as long as the community was very active. But as far as I can tell, Esperanto is perfect: very interesting history, commendable philosophical underpinnings, and enough speakers for it to be of some actual practical use.

I think it can be interesting to see how other languages are put together, what ideas you might not have thought of, how minimalistic you can be or what can happen if you take certain linguistic theories to their logical conclusion, and so on. But if you want an international language that can be used to actually do things other than talk about the language itself or allow you to ask someone to pour you a beer, there are vanishingly few possibilities, and Esperanto is at the top of the heap (at least as far as non-national languages are concerned).

creedelambard:
Very strange. Intentionally so. The designer (Mark Okrand) set out to make it almost, but not quite, entirely unlike any other language with which an Earthling might be familiar, to paraphrase Douglas Adams. So the sound is very gutteral, the language is highly agglutinative, and word order is backwards from our point of view (most sentences run object-verb-subject rather than the typical English other way round).

Check out the Wikipedia article "Klingon language". It can give you a better overview than I can.

Pretty interesting. If I was a bigger Star Trek fan then I might try to learn it, but I can't say I get into the show quite that much.

One thing I noted from the article was that "its vocabulary, heavily centered on Star Trek-Klingon concepts such as spacecraft or warfare, can sometimes make it cumbersome for everyday use." It seems that after all this time they would've gone out of their way to come up with some normal words for regular conversation.

creedelambard:I think it can be interesting to see how other languages are put together, what ideas you might not have thought of, how minimalistic you can be or what can happen if you take certain linguistic theories to their logical conclusion, and so on. But if you want an international language that can be used to actually do things other than talk about the language itself or allow you to ask someone to pour you a beer, there are vanishingly few possibilities, and Esperanto is at the top of the heap (at least as far as non-national languages are concerned).

The thing, at least with me, is that languages are just too hard to learn to jump into them frivolously. I've been trying to learn Spanish on and off for years and still suck, so I have to be careful what I decide to invest my time into.

Before I die, it's a goal of mine to at least be conversational in English (done!), Spanish, Esperanto and Japanese.

If I get all those out of the way, then I might tackle French and/or Mandarin.

And for historical purposes, I'd like to dip my toe into Latin and ancient Greek.

SPX:I'm just not sure it would be worth it for me to study a language where the speakers aren't at least in the thousands. Maybe if there was nothing else available then I could get on board with a language that had several hundred speakers as long as the community was very active. But as far as I can tell, Esperanto is perfect: very interesting history, commendable philosophical underpinnings, and enough speakers for it to be of some actual practical use.

This is the old, old problem: why learn a(n artificial) language if there is no one to use it with, but if no one goes to the trouble to learn it, then there will never be anyone to use it with. Few people want to be the first learners and users. They want to wait on others. Z faced this problem, as we well know. However it happened, E-o did amass a body of users, and a few others (I am thinking particularly of Interlingua and Ido) have amassed enough users with enough output that I myself call them real languages, and not just "projects," but even E-o is small in real world terms. Again, as we well know, many people, if they have even heard of E-o at all, consider it a hobby or even "toy" language, not something to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, there are those who think that a few others (again, I-a and/or Ido) have enough potential that they are willing to put some effort into learning and using them. It just depends on what your priorities are.

bartlett22183:
This is the old, old problem: why learn a(n artificial) language if there is no one to use it with, but if no one goes to the trouble to learn it, then there will never be anyone to use it with. Few people want to be the first learners and users. They want to wait on others. Z faced this problem, as we well know. However it happened, E-o did amass a body of users, and a few others (I am thinking particularly of Interlingua and Ido) have amassed enough users with enough output that I myself call them real languages, and not just "projects," but even E-o is small in real world terms. Again, as we well know, many people, if they have even heard of E-o at all, consider it a hobby or even "toy" language, not something to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, there are those who think that a few others (again, I-a and/or Ido) have enough potential that they are willing to put some effort into learning and using them. It just depends on what your priorities are.

Yes, well this is why I think it would be very hard for a new constructed language to get off the ground. I just don't think that enough people would see the point. Perhaps it could gain a small following of people who just wanted to tinker with it, though I would imagine it would end up being a case of a few people playing around for a little while, getting bored, and then letting the language die.

For me, personally, the only other constructed language that I would consider learning would be Interlingua. The concept is brilliant: Learn it and you can understand, and be understood, anywhere that Romance languages are spoken. From a practical standpoint, considering the number of countries where Romance languages ARE spoken, this could be very useful indeed. To be honest, I'm really kind of surprised that Interlingua is not currently the reigning title holder for this very reason, but for whatever reason it never really got off the ground and Esperanto reigns supreme. (I'm really not sure how close, in reality, that Interlingua comes to reaching it's goal. Perhaps it works only in theory.)

As I understand it, SPX, the designer of Interlingua in striving to achieve instant recognizability of forms, made it very difficult to be certain of using correct forms when writing the language (I don't think it was ever intended to be spoken).

In contrast, a text in Esperanto may not produce instant recognition. You have to put some effort into learning how the language works first. However once you have overcome this initial hurdle, you can have a very high level of confidence about whether you are speaking or writing it correctly.

The issue with interlingua is that it is mainly meant for passive understanding - it isn't designed to be super easy to learn. Romance languages are already mutually intelligible to a great extent, and I feel like it's more worth your while to learn French, Spanish, or Italian, than to learn Interlingua. It will be more effort but not a ton more, and you'll speak a language with a large literature, and you will still be able to understand a lot of text written in other Romance languages.