Re: Esperanto's changes since inception

Thomas wrote:

<<A colleague of mine in the department is interested in studying
how Esperanto has developed into a naturalistic language over the
century or so of its use. She wants to know questions like:  how
has the morphosyntax, derivational morphology and lexicon of the
language changed from Zamenhof's original conception? Does anyone
know of any good (=nonpartisan, nonproselytizing) resources on this
fact?  (Obviously, since the politics of auxlanging is forbidden
from this list, I want to avoid that angle of it if at all possible.)>>

I won't try to give you any data, but I will say that I know several 
Esperantists.   Most of them would probably deny that there have been any changes, but 
if your colleague wants to seriously look into this, I strongly recommend he 
talk to a professor over here at UCSD named Grant Goodall.   He's a 
syntactician that's also running the language program over here.   I'm TA'ing for him 
right now in his class on first and second language acquisition, and I've 
learned that he's been an avid Esperantist since he was 13, and is actually on the 
board of...something (I forget the name) related to Esperanto.   Nevertheless, 
I'd say he's far more objective than the other Esperantists I've met.   He's 
also got information on studies that have been done on native Esperanto 
speakers (the one I've learned about, which is related to the class, is one in which 
children's usage of the accusative /-n/ was tested.   Their frequency with the 
suffix was compared to the frequency of their parents' usage).   So I 
strongly recommend your colleague talk to Grant.   Here's his campus webpage:

http://ling.ucsd.edu/~goodall/

-David