For those who perhaps got interested by previous post about planned languages, I continue to introduce my own take about the subject.
For the perfect introduction to the world of planned (constructed, artificial, auxiliary, international) languages, look no further than Wikipedia - they have both summarizing article and pretty good pages about particular languages. For this post of mine, the most important excerpt from Wikipedia article is this:
“Constructed languages are categorized as either a priori languages or a posteriori languages. The grammar and vocabulary of the former are created from scratch, either by the author’s imagination or by computation; the latter possess a grammar and vocabulary derived from natural language.
In turn, a posteriori languages are divided into schematic languages, in which a natural or partly natural vocabulary is altered to fit pre-established rules, and naturalisticlanguages, in which a natural vocabulary retains its normal sound and appearance. While Esperanto is generally considered schematic, Interlingua is viewed as naturalistic. Ido is presented either as a schematic language or as a compromise between the two types.”
In this fragment, you can see the “big three” - most popular planned languages, usually viewed as most probable candidates to learn. Of course, they are others (for example, Occidental, Toki Pona, Volapük, Latino sine Flexione, Lingua Franca Nova), less popular but not necessarily worse than any of the “big three”, but since very conveniently we have here schematic, naturalistic and intermediate options to compare, let’s review only these.
Schematic languages provide most abstraction from national languages, while naturalistic use their resemblance to natural language as a biggest advantage. This is one of the reasons why Esperanto itself is often considered a leftist language and its adepts - nonconformists and even marxists. Which is nothing more than a stereotype. True, average Esperantist has more international and idealistic viewpoints than a random guy-next-door, but calling them marxist is an exaggeration to say the least. I personally think that too much politics is forcedly (and falsely) applied to conlangs.
Selecting the planned language to learn, a person should understand why he or she does so. The motives themselves can help to make a decision. Obviously enough, people learn language to have possibility to communicate to other people. By far the biggest conlang is Esperanto, so the first logical thought is to start learning it. This enables communication in this language with up to one million people worldwide. However, in case of naturalistic language, the strong point is their similarity to real languages. Interlingua adepts argue that after learning their language, one can comprehend to a big extent any of Romance languages, so going this way could provide help with communication with up to one _billion_ people worlwide.
The both numbers are clearly optimistic if learner will never go beyond learning just one conlang. But the main point I personally like about conlangs is that learning them is a bridge to easier and faster learning of real languages. My favourite language of big three is Ido - being schematic in a good way, and having lots of naturalistic vocabulary, it makes a good choice to cover the most possible variants. And I also like how it looks and sounds. But it’s just me - everyone can have his own preference.
In next posts I will share more thoughts about conlangs as an educational instrument.