sharks + planes as formerly seen on Twitter

I mean I would not rule out some guys in ancient mesopotamia coming up with some wild shit to get the babylonians off their back

It's a language where palindromes have special grammatical status due to the fact you're supposed to be able to construct any word's antonym by singing it backward

Okay, so here's a tangent.

I found out about Interlingua only in the last couple weeks (for bystanders: Interlingua is a conlang designed so any speaker of a romance language should be able to mostly comprehend it without being taught it first). And I'm frustrated to say find I find the project pretty cool, and can in fact read it unprepared as an English/Spanglish speaker, and the reason this frustrates me is because the thing that introduced me to Interlingua was finding out that it had been adopted by the Urbit project. So your conlang realized IALs are hard, and it decided to make the problem tractable by making it smaller, which is always good design thinking. And mysteriously it got adopted by a group of people who are known from other work to specifically consider Europe and the European colonialist diaspora the only important part of the Earth. That's really uncomfortable. "White supremacists like this thing you made for some reason" is always a danger sign.

It still does seem like a cool idea, especially once you find out about Interslavic, which is Interlingua for slavic instead of romance languages and appears to really actually work. It makes me wonder if we can Interlingua the whole globe, or rather makes me wonder how much of the globe we can cover with various Interlinguas. I imagine a space station where the signs are in Interlingua, Interslavic, Arabic, Mandarin and maybe two or three other such "local IALs". How far can you get?

Africa has lots of languages but fewer language families than you might expect, several African language families have very wide extent. How many of those families would admit an Interlingua-style local IAL, or could be reached by a "local Esperanto" that tried to reach across African language families with adjacent geographical extents? (Has this been actually tried and I just haven't heard about it?) Same questions, Australasia? I mentioned Mandarin above, written Mandarin already appears to be a kind of regional IAL given how many distinct languages either use it or at some point in the last 400 years have used it as a local writing system while speaking an unrelated language (Korea, Vietnam), but then there's the question of what's your spoken form and also the question of whether it's politically awkward given the reasons Korea and Vietnam adopted Hanzi. And on a related note the difficult part of this "interlingua basket" idea seems to be the Indian subcontinent, because, and this is a big subject but, my understanding is it's not only one of the most linguistically diverse regions in the world but also language is politicized there to the extent the auxiliary language India adopted is English because at least it doesn't offend any one faction more than any other.

I dunno. It's an interesting set of things to consider but I struggle because the IALs I'm aware of are Eurocentric, the people who have tried to de-Eurocentralize IALs are still basically within the European cultural context, and I myself am within this cultural context so if I try to imagine "what would it look like to actually break out of this cultural context?" I fundamentally cannot trust I'm doing it right

yeah this feels more on point to me

even as a non-native Japanese speaker, "it's like Japanese" wasn't really a reaction I had when I encountered toki pona? like, specifically thinking about the comparison, i guess they both have particles, nouns mostly aren't inflected to distinguish singular/plural, and the phonotactics are very similar in a way that I'd believe was deliberate. but the basic experience of parsing a Japanese sentence is very different (phrases are head-final, sentences are subject-object-verb), and there are so many inflections for verbs (and adjectives too) which toki pona doesn't do at all