Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

A clarification comment here to help explain what is going on here- re: the 'non-native' part of the comment above.

Swahili specifically is a second language to a population speaking a very very diverse set of first / primary languages.

Swahili is spoken in East Africa - Burundi, Congo, Kenya, Uganda, Somalia ( southern tip) Rwanda, Tanzania.

Kenya and Tanzania have the largest part of speakers and in Tanzania, there are over 20 'first' languages and in Kenya , there are at least 20 'first' languages as well.

Also important to note that Swahili is formally taught in primary / grade school, alongside either English or sometimes French, to a population that already speaks a different first language used by a much smaller population.

The point here is that there are many many first languages that are sources for "borrowing" into Swahili but that borrowing has to be adopted across all Swahili users who will not share that first language.

This means that only the 'easiest' / 'lowest friction changes' make it through over time into Swahili as all words also have to be accepted by speakers having other "first' aside from the ones that each word or language component was 'borrowed' from.

Consider that we could use '-ed' as the past tense for all words: runned, sitted, drinked, eated, standed, twisted, cutted, turned, seeed, heared, beated, beginned, bended, digged, hurted, holded, selled, sended, shaked, singed, spended, standed, stinked, teached, telled, winned. My first reaction is that it sounds like babytalk, because the only place those are used is by children before they learn to speak 'properly'. They are understandable - if we wanted more regular language, we could just switch to speaking more regular English. Nobody could stop us. We don't, conclusion: we don't want that. The irregular cases are partly there because they have been worn into being that way, rather than having that worn away, like r/DesirePaths[1] are the paths people want to take instead of the paths prescribed for them. Worn through frequent use and it being shorter to say eat/ate than eat/eated.

We signal adultness, nativeness, in-group membership, social status, educational status by knowing and using the weird edge cases. Poor people say "baarff" instead of "bath", foreign people say "walk dog" instead of "walk the dog", educated people can spell and use Latin and Greek origin words. In a similar way that jelly and ice cream is famously a children's dessert while mouldy cheese on herb crackers is an adult dessert. Pop goes the weasel is a children's tune and Mozart is an educated adult's composer. Spot the Dog is a children's story, War and Peace isn't. A language which has "all the weird edge-cases have worn away, and they are as smooth and beautiful as a river" is also a Sistine Chapel where all the details have worn away and the whole ceiling is a smooth and beautiful brown, or a Mozart where all the distinct instruments have worn away and the whole tune is a smooth and pure sine wave. People would rather visit a landscape or a church than an empty warehouse - the mind likes details, something to grip on. The programming languages where everything is TokiPona, it's all parentheses, it's all CPU instructions, it's all stack primitives, it's all array transforms, are not the popular ones; when everything looks the same you have a hard time telling where you are or expressing things which are different, differently.

A centrally planned "people's language" is about as desirable as a centrally planned "people's car"; one generation after everyone speaks Esperanto, everyone would speak their own dialect of Esperanto with extra chrome, alloy wheels, turbo charger, cutdown exhaust, go-faster stripes, custom decals, fat tyres - the original language, the variant that's more flowery and poetic, the one that's more modern and refined, the one that's more minimal and purer, the one which is more casual and slangy and youthful and irreverant and less regular, the one with more regional or historic loan words, the one spoken by the upper classes or the famous people, etc.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/DesirePaths/

    Tycho               taIkoU
    aperitif            a#pEr@t'i:f
    (wouldn't have to)  ,wUd@-ntavt@5       $verbf $strend2

    _d) am (i      eIm
   und) am (en     @m
     _) am (en     a#m

by contrast, es_rules (for Spanish) is 285 lines long, and then there are 391 lines of exceptions (mostly things like "thunderbird" and "software") in es_list

in chinese, instead of several thousand rules, you have several tens of thousands of rules, one for each character (which are not in a one-for-one correspondence with words but are roughly as numerous)

As a math major and lifelong chess player ... "cringy" is how I feel about so many math and chess people I meet. It sucks.

Intellectuals so often are impractical, and also interpersonally challenging. I wish I had spent my childhood on team sports instead.