erinja:

pdenisowski:It appears Ido is also still kicking around, but I'm sure someone here is better qualified than me to talk on that subject.

I have a great deal of sympathy for Ido speakers. They are really a very small community but somehow they have hung on (and continue to publish futile articles in Esperanto about how Ido is much better than Esperanto).

In a way, looking at the Ido movement from an Esperantist's eyes presents a view of how the Esperanto movement must look from the outside. Pictures of Idists (mostly middle-aged or old) posing with their Ido flag, going on tourist excursions, discussing how to promote Ido, singing Ido songs together - it looks very familiar to an Esperanto event, only on a smaller scale! And it looks pointless and pathetic.

Thanks - that's pretty much what I expected.

There was a time when Radio Verda would poke fun at Ido speakers. My favorite one was a take-off of the "you say tomAHto, I say tomAto" song (in Esperanto) about Esperanto and Ido words.

Amike,
Paul

5) Esperanto was created at a time of ideals, people believed that they could change the world... So it's really a fluke of history

I wonder how true it is that if Esperanto had never been invented it would have no chance of catching on, if it appeared (with the same design) today.

Surely if Klingon can produce adherents, then the hypothesized newly invented Esperanto could be assumed to find some followers.

Of course, it would take some time for it to reach the stage of having its equivalent of NPIV or PMEG based on established usage. But can we be quite certain that this would not occur?

The more I reflect on it, the more plausible it seems to me that it is the design principles of the language that have been responsible for Esperanto's success.

sudanglo:Surely if Klingon can produce adherents, then the hypothesized newly invented Esperanto could be assumed to find some followers.

Klingon is a special case, because it had a popular TV show behind it. Pop culture meant that lots of people knew what a Klingon was, so it was as if they'd heard of the language, by default. And people got interested in learning Klingon mainly because of the TV show (like people learn Elvish). They probably stayed with it for the language and the community, but I would say that most Klingon speakers started with it because they liked Star Trek.

A better example for today is Toki Pona. But even that's not a totally fair example, because Toki Pona was created by an Esperantist, and I think you had a fairly large community of people (Esperantists) who were predisposed to find it interesting.

I think having an idea behind the language is important, and Toki Pona has that as well ("The simple language of good"), stripping everything down to its barest essence.

I remember the earliest website for Toki Pona. It was fun and engaging to read, and it included bad teenage angst poetry translated into Toki Pona, which was a fun idea. Toki Pona's site still includes the bad poetry, but it has lost some of its early charm (no doubt intentionally, I'm sure the old site would look quite clunky and old-fashioned today).

erinja:

sudanglo:Surely if Klingon can produce adherents, then the hypothesized newly invented Esperanto could be assumed to find some followers.

Klingon is a special case, because it had a popular TV show behind it.

"Had" is the important word. Klingon's popularity seems to be rapidly falling in the absence of recent Trek movies or TV series. For example, the KLI (Klingon Language Institute) website is almost defunct, there have been no new books or magazines (like HolQeD) published in some time, and it's almost impossible to find an active Klingon discussion board or mailing list (with one notable exception). The only two audio programs for learning Klingon (Conversational Klingon and Power Klingon) are now only available as second-hand cassettes. Amazon still has most of the books though.

Oddly enough, there is a pretty good iPhone app that contains much of the older audio material, a comprehensive (as Klingon goes) dictionary/grammar, and even a lexical parser.

Amike,
Paul