carlosedepaula scribeva:20 000 active speakers is a huge number if we consider it is an artificial language.
In my opinion thats quite positive estimation. These E-o folks are more keen to hold "keep alive" status than bulking number of E-o speakers.
carlosedepaula scribeva:Even though we can already use interlingua with non-interlinguists, having an active speakers base is fundamental for new things to appear in the language, for learners to have someone to practice with and for people from outside the community to see it is alive and worth learning.
Definitely.
carlosedepaula scribeva:What I wanted to say in the summer camp part is that this kind of thing actually already exists. Like esperanto in Gresillon, which several people already attend.
Eventoj.hu claims to list most E-o events worldwide. What I have seen is that lists of pre-enrolled participants are puplished only for E-o youth events. Finaly one quarter of fourth who pre-enrolled this are participants who will not show up. I don't know situation with political E-o events i.e. SAT etc. Could be different there.
carlosedepaula scribeva:For example, if you are a computer programmer, you can come up with a incredibly good useful purpose for the language, if you are a teacher, you can find ways to use it with teaching its source languages, etc... Same goes for whatever you can think of.
Biggest showstopper is situation that there doesn't excists minimalistic multi-language translated schoolbook of Interlingua. I.e. something like compilation of Ingvar Stenström's and André Schild's teaching course with lots of exercises. My personal dream is to suceed for subtitle translation of some creative commons licence movie with some controversial topic, modifying spoken parts of it to get dubbing material, creation of karaoke-like ("syllable-triggered") dialog instructions, later competition to dub that movie into spoken Interlingua.
carlosedepaula scribeva:And you can actually take advantage of these projects, their primary intention is not just "spread interlingua".
I agree, mainly motivation to use Interlingua should lie within Interlingua. Motivation should not lie only inside ambition to spread something.
carlosedepaula scribeva:That is what can make the difference, compared to esperanto. Esperanto can't be used for much with non-speakers.
I agree. Its quite disappointing.
carlosedepaula scribeva:And the general mentality I see in their movemente is "spread spread spread" so they can, maybe, one day, used.
Well, I didn't attend at political orientated E-o events. I only visited non-political orientated European youth E-o events. So, for sure there show up some political radicals but definitely they are minority. But most participants are user of E-o, even not interested to help much with organization of E-o events. Leaning to consume E-o events offers only, that mentality also arrived at E-o (youth) events. I don't know why it is so, but simply "spread, spread, spread" requests will be ignored by majority of E-o youth event participants.
carlosedepaula scribeva:Interlingua is useful already, but a speakers base of 20 000 would be more than enough people to find a lot of good uses to the language.
For sure. But 300 - 500 keen of travel active speakers of Interlingua would be enough to get it running first. In my opinion its more realistic to focus on high active 300-500 "show-runner" of Interlingua than XX,000 early adopter.