Bottled water, preserved in a flat and insipid state for all time, may be fine in a desert - but give me natural language that dropeth as the gentle rain from heaven!
Nice example. Would you also prefer taking a bite out of a living cow instead of opening a can of cooked meat?
As Mencken said, “A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small haemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.” This kind of vitality, I suggest, can only be found when responsibility for a mother tongue’s changing usage is vested in a wide and diverse group of individuals. Take this Board, for instance… we rarely agree on anything except our common love of language!
This is a very good point, indeed! And it also applies to Esperanto! In the very beginning the Esperanto community was as lively and diverse as this board, and so was the language itself. But after a couple of years some guys worried about the continuous discussion about developing the language further and fixed grammatical rules and vocabulary as if it was the ultimate thing. This, of course, was the point when Esperanto stopped to expand and ever since there is a great deal of stagnation. It even made the Esperanto community fall apart as many objected this decision to 'lock' the language. The biggest block of Esperantists leaving the community were those who created Ido, a kind of reformed Esperanto (which was not a big success either). The communities of other artificial languages should learn from this (partial) failure.
