Two questions, that I guess I'll roll into the same thread.

First question:

Does anyone know when new copies of Etimologia Vortaro de Esperanto will come available on the Esperanto-USA website? It seems like they've been out of stock forever. :-/

Second question:

It seems in the past few years there have been an increasing number of Esperanto dictionaries online and offline. Some of them were well needed updates such as Wells English<->Esperanto dictionary, others were interesting Internet projects that took off, such as the ESPDIC. (I keep wanting to spell that "EBCDIC." Yes, the character encoding.) I'm not sure if it's true, but I hear rumblings that Benson's dictionary is also going to get updated. Then, there are the specialist dictionaries: name etymologies, politics, medicine, and the list goes on...

Does anyone here thing Esperanto needs yet another niche/subject specific dictionary? Some thoughts I've seen put forward in other threads (mostly in passing) include:

• An erotic dictionary. I guess so we can experience Esperanto in all 50 shades of green.
  
• A law dictionary, such as a translation of Black's Law dictionary. (I think I put that forward myself, in another post.)
  
• An anti-neologism dictionary. There is actually a project for this online. Sorry, the link escapes me.
  
• A phrase book / dictionary of insults and profanity.
  
• Esperanto <-> Other Planned Language. Because, Klingons should speak Esperanto too!
  
• Any highly technical niche.

The "anti-neologism dictionary" you mean may be Simplaj samsignifaj vortoj.

A kind of erotic dictionary is Tabuaj vortoj en Esperanto.

An English->Esperanto translators/interpreters dictionary for all those expressions and turns of phrase you won't find in Wells or Benson. Could be put up on the net in Wiki form.

eg under 'baby' - 'throw the baby out with the bath water'
under 'bucket' - 'kick the bucket'
under 'one' - 'back to square one'

and so on.

Interestingly if you put 'kick the bucket' into Google Translate it comes out with the correct translation in French 'casser sa pipe', and going in the other direction it translates 'repartir de zéro' as 'start from scratch'.

Ŝmeg! Baldaŭ la maŝinoj estos la mastroj!

eojeff:First question: Does anyone know when new copies of Etimologia Vortaro de Esperanto will come available on the Esperanto-USA website? It seems like they've been out of stock forever. :-/

I'm waiting too, although they did have the Konciza Etimologia Vortaro in stock last time I checked. It looks like it's available now through the UEA.

eojeff:Second question: (snip) Does anyone here thing Esperanto needs yet another niche/subject specific dictionary?

Paper or digital? I'm a big fan of paper dictionaries (have several hundred of them), but now that I can get comprehensive, high-quality, professional electronic dictionaries (Duden, Pons, Oxford, Langenscheidt, etc.), I've almost stopped buying paper dictionaries in almost all languages.

In the case of digital dictionaries, I think the trend is to roll them into one big dictionary. The most important online Japanese dictionary (EDICT, where the name "ESPDIC" was derived from), used to have a wide variety of standalone specialty dictionaries -- I was one of the people who compiled COMPDIC (the computer and telecom sub-dictionary) back in 2002 but by 2008 is was folded into the main dictionary.

So the short answer is that (in my opinion) it's getting harder to justify a paper or print specialty dictionary.

eojeff:A phrase book / dictionary of insults and profanity.

Check out "Knedu min sinjorino" (also perpetually out of stock at Esperanto USA)

eojeff:Esperanto <-> Other Planned Language. Because, Klingons should speak Esperanto too!

I have a book about Interlingua for Esperanto speakers (Kio estas Interlingua), which was published by the Interlingua side. Esperantujo continues to do its best to ignore Interlingua (the second most active constructed language) whenever possible

Amike,

Paul

I don't know if I'd say that Esperantists go out of their way to avoid Interlingua (I know several who speak it, at least to a degree). But it hasn't got the appeal that Volapuk has. There was that new Esperanto/Volapuk dictionary put out a couple of years ago. It's hard to imagine Interlingua sustaining as much interest as that in the Esperanto world. Volapuk has an ugly charm that Interlingua lacks, perhaps.

On specialty dictionaries, there are loads of them. Medicine, railway, stock market, anatomy, insects, etc. The Esperanto-USA online store has a page devoted to them

I expect the UEA web store will have a selection as well.

Concerning dictionaries, a revised version of Rudiger Eichholz' Esperanta Bildvortaro (by Petro Desmet and Jozefo Horvath) has recently been published and is available from UEA. Here's a further description in Esperanto. Eichholz' book had an index which this one doesn't, but the index is available online. Eichholz is out of print, but possibly downloadable.