I’ll write more about the failure of Esperanto and how I think we can do better.
In my opinion, the difficult part of things like this is coordination. There are already hundreds, maybe thousands, of constructed languages. Most of them probably have less than dozen actual speakers, i.e. people who can fluently keep a general conversation. And yet, many people decide that the best way to solve this situation is to create yet another constructed language. (Definitely not to support the one that already has a few orders of magnitude more speakers than the remaining constructed languages combined.)
So it seems to me that you either assume that coordination is easy in general, or that making the right design choices in your language will have a very powerful effect on all potential speakers. The former seems disproved by evidence; the latter kinda by outside view… consider the hundreds of authors of the other constructed languages—they probably also believe that the impressive features of their languages will irresistibly draw humanity to their project—what exactly is it that makes all of them wrong and you alone right?
Your opinion is correct. Coordination is actually 1 of the hardest things for a successful IAL. That’s why before talking about how to choose the best design, we’ll have to solve the coordination problem.
The most salient thing I’ve observed from conlang fora is that practically all of the constructed tongues there are built by individual authors. Most of them are full of themselves, and thus, as you precisely put it, believe that their language is so impressive every single one on Earth should run over and beg to learn. Those biased people are not the kind I’d want to invite into the great IAL project.
In my opinion, the difficult part of things like this is coordination. There are already hundreds, maybe thousands, of constructed languages. Most of them probably have less than dozen actual speakers, i.e. people who can fluently keep a general conversation. And yet, many people decide that the best way to solve this situation is to create yet another constructed language. (Definitely not to support the one that already has a few orders of magnitude more speakers than the remaining constructed languages combined.)
So it seems to me that you either assume that coordination is easy in general, or that making the right design choices in your language will have a very powerful effect on all potential speakers. The former seems disproved by evidence; the latter kinda by outside view… consider the hundreds of authors of the other constructed languages—they probably also believe that the impressive features of their languages will irresistibly draw humanity to their project—what exactly is it that makes all of them wrong and you alone right?
Your opinion is correct. Coordination is actually 1 of the hardest things for a successful IAL. That’s why before talking about how to choose the best design, we’ll have to solve the coordination problem.
The most salient thing I’ve observed from conlang fora is that practically all of the constructed tongues there are built by individual authors. Most of them are full of themselves, and thus, as you precisely put it, believe that their language is so impressive every single one on Earth should run over and beg to learn. Those biased people are not the kind I’d want to invite into the great IAL project.