Well, hrmph. I myself am not happy with Esperanto, kvankam mi povas paroli la lingvon iom bone [although I can speak the language somewhat well.] My best friend is trying to learn Esperanto but is having tremendous difficulty and I don't understand why.

Some of the criticisms of Esperanto are fair (such as the redundancy of certain grammatical endings, the irregular, haphazard word derivation system - see my web page http://geocities.com/Qwertie256/misc/es … lems.html). But other criticisms are unfair because they are inescapable - for example some will criticize it for being too "Euro-centric", saying that word roots should be taken from all major world languages; while others will say it ought to be more recognizable to Europeans. And although to some extent arguments about the wordstock are quite reasonable, it should be kept in mind that for any constructed language there are *always* critics of the wordstock and critics of a language's word compounding system, no matter how the vocabulary was selected or what the system is.

Nevertheless there are a lot of common criticisms of Esperanto that have been avoided by other languages without much critical repercussion. For example, if an IAL (international auxilliary language) design doesn't have accusative case markers and plural adjective agreement, the strongest criticism you'll hear is that it's "no better than Esperanto".

I'm afraid I can't see Basic English as a good international language. Why would one want to learn a language with the all the phonological and spelling difficulties of English, except as a stepping-stone on the way to full English? I agree with DreymaR: it's hard to imagine many English speakers would be inclined to learn Basic English (I, for one, am not).

In any case, it's not really up to us, is it? As DreymaR pointed out, a language, more than a keyboard layout, requires a community (though it certainly helps for keyboards too.) In over a hundred years Esperanto's community has only grown to between 100,000-3,000,000 speakers (estimates vary widely) and I can't imagine it growing much more than that with the way things are now. Some people assume that if any IAL succeeds, it will be Esperanto. I don't like that idea since I would really like some other IAL to "win" instead (perhaps Ido, perhaps Novial, perhaps some as-yet-not-invented language to be designed by a team of the world's top linguists). With so few speakers, Esperanto has the ideology and momentum to survive, but not to become a second language for the world.

I think what an IAL really needs to thrive is government support. The UN would be a good start--as Claude Piron has pointed out, with the UN's large document translation expenses, it could actually save money by standardizing on Esperanto or another IAL. But to really thrive I think an IAL would need a home base, a geographic area where it thrives. An area where at least two languages are spoken already.

Consider that it is more economical to make everyone learn an "easy" IAL than to make everyone learn a particular "natural" language. For example, suppose you have a region in which a few different languages are spoken and that the most popular language is X (X could be English or anything else.) Suppose 50% of the people can speak X and that there is an IAL called L that can be learned in 1/4 of the time it takes to learn X. Then teaching everyone L should cost half as much as teaching everyone X.

It would be more economical in the long run if children were brought up on Colemak instead of Qwerty. But the problem is community: languages need big communities to thrive; an existing large community of IAL speakers might grow naturally, but such a community cannot form spontaneously. I think a government somewhere needs to create that community by bringing up a generation of children on a particular IAL.

I can't point to a particular place in the world where an IAL would be an obvious solution to a language problem. But there must be someplace where it would be a good idea--some place where three or four languages are spoken and where language barriers are somehow economically detrimental, so that an IAL is the most efficient solution to the economic language barrier problem. Of course, personally I think language barriers should be removed even if there is no clear economic benefit, but that is an altruist belief and the argument "it's the right thing to do" is rarely (never?) enough to convince a government of anything.

So the point is, it's not up to those of us who speak or promote IALs to decide which one will "win". It's up to governments--the organizations in charge of teaching children--to decide if and which language will obtain a large community of speakers. Governments seem to be the only entities powerful enough to create the requisite communities. All ordinary citizens can do is seed-planting... spreading the idea around so that perhaps one day it will be "on the table" during government negotiations.

check out lojban or loglish!

English is a good international language.

Thanks to the British Empire, it's known widely. And thanks to French being the language of England's elite at the time, English developed into an easy to learn, grammaticaly simple language.

The French language should be simplified. Some attempts have been made but L'Académie Française has refused all of them. Except one that was passed in 1990 and it's taking years to implement.

A simplified Version of English exists. It's funny, i don't see why it's easier in any way than conventional English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English

Fairly devoid of disambiguation issues, sporting exhilarating archaic flourishes with which to daunt the novices, in possession of a vocabulary purloined from a plenitude of sources that nowadays is sufficiently large to warrant impending gravitational thesauric collapses... indeed, that's the good international language we all love and cherish for sure.

English is so far the only language that has presented me with an actual word-a-day calendar - for native speakers, no less. I was astounded to find that I, a Norwegian, knew several English words that several well-educated English people I met didn't. (The nincompoops didn't know what a rood is, pah!) Be that as it may, I'm still the proverbial fish on dry land whenever I make a stab at true fluency.

My stint as an Esperantist at least presented an opportunity to meet fellow speakers on diplomatically plainer ground, all other things set aside.

How come your English is so developed DreymaR? The Internets? Books ? It's surprising because i bet you probably have ZERO opportunities to speak your English in Norway.

Silphatos : I don't really get your point, but the thing is : I speak French, Dreymar speaks Normand and still, thanks to English, we can communicate.  So if it works! Well it works! No need to change it!

Well we knew that since you knew what "rood" was.    :)

Why is a Norseman dressing like a Roman ?

If my memory serves me, the Vikings occupied a fair part of Britain and because of this the Norse language had a hand in simplifying English grammar.