andogigi:I had heard that you guys weren't meeting anymore. Is that not the case?

It's very sporadic. Are you on our listserv? That's the place to hear about these things.

I seldom attend the meetings. No offense to all you lovely beginners out there, but the meetings are beginner-heavy. It goes from tortured conversation to helping beginners with whatever; it's not the free-flowing conversation that I used to get in the monthly meetings of the Boston group.

The winter Zamenhof banquet is the thing to attend, though of course it's only once a year. That's when all of the fluent speakers come out of their holes and show up. Perhaps we could plan a summer barbecue or something, to get everyone together for something a little more structured than a meeting for coffee.

However, if you should ever like to meet up with some of us locals, I could probably organize a day of Esperanto-language DC tourism for you. I could almost certainly rustle up some fluent speakers to go around together for the day. Perhaps this year's Folklife Festival would be a good time for something like that.

jan aleksan:Because esperanto is man-made, one can consider he has the right to criticise. It's like a piece of art, you like or not. But you can not criticise a thing built by "natural" evolution (like national languages), because it is what it is.

"O stulta kuniklo, kial vi ne povas flugi? Klare, vi bezonas plibonigojn"
vs.
"O stulta robota kuniklo, kial vi ne povas flugi? Klare vi bezonas plibonigojn"

If you heard the first one, unless you hate rabbits (), you'd probably be appalled.
But, if you heard the second, you'd go "Oh just another robot-making-crazy-scientist at work".

The ironic thing though is that the robot bunny might have as much intelligence, and as much a "soul" (however you define that - as the spirit or as the volition of the organism or whatever) as the real bunny, but for some reason changing one is fine but changing the other is just plain horrible. It must be something to do with how we humans understand things around us. As far as naturally evolved languages go, they're so deeply rooted into our minds that they appear too complex for us to deconstruct. EO, on the other hand, is fairly artificial in origin, and because of its relatively sandboxed position in our minds we feel the need to deconstruct and agree/disagree with its features. Native languages on the other hand are like our normal little bunny friend mentioned before - too complicated and not really made to change so artificially.