Yeah, but it fails at its objective when considered outside a European context.
"Interlingua has detached itself from the movement for the development and introduction of a universal language for all humanity. Whether or not one believes that a language for all humanity is possible, whether or not one believes that Interlingua will become such a language is totally irrelevant from the point of view of Interlingua itself. The only fact that matters (from the point of view of Interlingua itself) is that Interlingua, thanks to its ambition of reflecting the cultural and thus linguistic homogeneity of the West, is capable of rendering tangible services at this precise moment in the history of the world. It is by its present contributions and not by the promises of its adherents that Interlingua wishes to be judged."
It was created with a goal of taking its structure and vocabulary from other common European (mostly Romance) languages, which means if one is familiar with those languages, they can already decently read Interlingua. The same passage from above, for those who might know some Romance language:
"Interlingua se ha distachate ab le movimento pro le disveloppamento e le introduction de un lingua universal pro tote le humanitate. Si o non on crede que un lingua pro tote le humanitate es possibile, si o non on crede que interlingua va devenir un tal lingua es totalmente indifferente ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme. Le sol facto que importa (ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme) es que interlingua, gratias a su ambition de reflecter le homogeneitate cultural e ergo linguistic del occidente, es capace de render servicios tangibile a iste precise momento del historia del mundo. Il es per su contributiones actual e non per le promissas de su adherentes que interlingua vole esser judicate."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
[2] Not that I've actually studied either, for full disclosure.
But, yes, with English being the de facto standard, these more localized attempts are becoming redundant - you want to know English anyway because you want to talk to more people, and once you know it, you might as well use it to talk even to people whose languages are related to yours.
Maybe it's because I'm vaguely aware of the phonetic changes between east and west Slavic languages (ić - it, ska - skaja, etc), because I've heard some Russian and Ukrainian on street markets in 90s.
Haven't had much experience with other Slavic speakers, but Serbian sounds quite close to western Slavic from the songs I've heard.
I natively know Polish and I know some very little Russian back from high school and Interslavic is more clear to me than Slovio.
I'm interested in linguistics so during one CS conference in Zagreb I asked a few Czechs, Croats, Slovaks, Slovenians, one Belarusian (native in Russian actually but he knew some Belarusian) and back in Poland a few Poles who know only Polish and the results were quite mixed.
It really might be better to just treat this as a curio and speak your own (especially in your own West/East/South Slavic language subgroup) and hope for the best. Or just speak English...
e: Actually I found some info here: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD%97%E7%9B%B4%E6...
It looks like some systems are T-Code, TUT-code, etc.
I'm currently trying to learn it, because I hate scrolling through long lists of homophones to find some rarer character; but I have not yet achieved the level where I can just freely type out anything without looking up its key sequence.
(Esperanto is intended to be perfectly understandable without tonal inflection, through the use of particles such as "ĉu" and "ja", though in practice Westerners universally tonally inflect their speech because they don't know otherwise.)
I don't know though, what features from Asian languages do you think are objectively simpler to learn than those in Esperanto? I don't know Esperanto, but I am pretty sure that not all Asian languages are particularly tonal. So I doubt that would come naturally to them either. Particles? Those are pretty fantastic, but does Esperanto already have them? Maybe a lack of gendered conjugations? Or just no conjugations at all and instead a separate word modifier or particle for different contexts?
Certainly the syllabary of Japanese is wonderful, I think it's better than English. Every consonant except 'n' has a vowel after, every vowel sounds the same regardless of context. Removing the distinction between 'r' and 'l' or 'm' and 'n' seems wise though. But maybe they already did that too?
You might well answer that, in that case, being truly neutral seems more or less impossible. Maybe so, and maybe you do need to just pick something. But then we get away from the idea of removing political dominance from the equation.
The only place where I would agree Europeans have a significant advantage is that Esperanto has a European style letter script rather than an Asian character-based one. A fair point, and unfortunately no one has come up with something halfway between a letter and a character script. The best apolitical solution to that may be to make two alphabets for the next iteration of Esperanto.
The script is not really an issue; Chinese is the only major east Asian language (or language family) written exclusively in Chinese characters without a phonetic script, and even then the Roman alphabet is familiar.
It's easy to not appreciate this, but in a way the hardest thing about learning a language is mastering the vocabulary. Think about your native language. When was he last time you encountered a grammatical structure you were unfamiliar with? Now when was the last time you encountered a word you were unfamiliar with?
If you're studying two related languages, like Spanish and English, you get a huge boost from the fact that the more difficult words are actually more likely to be the same. You don't have to study very hard to understand what "planeta" or "geografía" or "farmacia" mean. On the other hand, if you're studying Japanese, you have to memorize words like "wakusei," "chiri", and "yakkyoku" which have no resemblance whatever to the English words. And it just goes on and on and you are never really done encountering all the words you will ever encounter. Compared to this slog, mastering a grammar and the number of irregularities typical of a natural language is a minor annoyance.
That's just wrong. All that means is that you haven't experienced all the crazy language features out there. Children all over the world learn their native languages at different speeds because some languages are harder than others.
I guess your statement is technically correct in that if you already know a really difficult language, learning it is easy, but that's just pedantry.
I'm going by the (admittedly, introductory) education I had in linguistics, so if you'd like to convince me otherwise I suppose I would need to see some sort of reliable source.
If a language avoids relying on tonal information for word definition, for instance, it is very counterintuitive to say that a toddler learning would pick it up exactly as fast as a toddler that only needs to handle syllable identification.
Way more languages, including Asian ones like Japanese and Korean, do not have words which completely change definition based on pitch. I don't have any reason to think a Korean adult would find it any easier than me to detect tones in Mandarin.
I don't know how to search for a reliable source in the field of linguistics, sorry. The idea is really counterintuitive for me though. It's not like Chinese and Japanese are very similar, even if they're more likely to broadly share word roots. Assuming we aren't using pictograph writing anyway, they do share a lot of those.
But if you're going to argue that learning pictograph writing is exactly as easy as learning character writing, I'll direct you to how Japanese kids only can read 1000 characters by the time they're 12. With syllabic writing you can read anything way sooner. So clearly for written language some are easier than others too.