It seems to me like the amount of work that went into new conlangs is very little. It’s not like there’s a random walk but that there’s little walking.
I do think we saw some process. Esperanto works better then Volapük. It’s easier to learn and more powerful.
Interlingue does have a benefit of being readable by Europeans who haven’t learned the language in a way that Esperanto isn’t but it loses the advantages you get from combing stems to form new words. Novial focuses on both being understandable and have the advantages of the stems.
It’s unfortunate that Interlingua which was pushed by the International Auxiliary Language Association which was actually an effort into which more resources were invested dropped the usefulness of having the stems and was more like a recreation of Interlingue.
It also didn’t have any thinking about how it could be more powerful then existing language.
More recently you have a project like Lingwa de planeta which tries to build on a structure similar to Novial while being less Eurocentric and more open to having words that sound like those speakers of major world languages already know.
However the idea that a constructed language could be superior to a natural language for a specific usecase and thus be adopted by speakers doesn’t seem to be in the awareness of the people who created more recent conlangs.
It seems to me like the amount of work that went into new conlangs is very little. It’s not like there’s a random walk but that there’s little walking.
I do think we saw some process. Esperanto works better then Volapük. It’s easier to learn and more powerful.
Interlingue does have a benefit of being readable by Europeans who haven’t learned the language in a way that Esperanto isn’t but it loses the advantages you get from combing stems to form new words. Novial focuses on both being understandable and have the advantages of the stems.
It’s unfortunate that Interlingua which was pushed by the International Auxiliary Language Association which was actually an effort into which more resources were invested dropped the usefulness of having the stems and was more like a recreation of Interlingue.
It also didn’t have any thinking about how it could be more powerful then existing language.
More recently you have a project like Lingwa de planeta which tries to build on a structure similar to Novial while being less Eurocentric and more open to having words that sound like those speakers of major world languages already know.
However the idea that a constructed language could be superior to a natural language for a specific usecase and thus be adopted by speakers doesn’t seem to be in the awareness of the people who created more recent conlangs.