The Best Hope: Artificial Auxiliaries
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A constructed language ("conlang") specifically created for auxiliary service represents the best hope for a permanent, profit-maximising solution to the language barrier. (However, most of the two-hundred-odd conlangs online are intended to do the opposite, to exclude outsiders or create mystique. Examples are Làaden, billed as a "women's language," and Klingon. Such projects are fun, but have little value as auxiliaries.)
People who wish to develop an artificial auxiliary run smack into a crucial decision from the very outset. Should the language borrow natural structure, or should it use an artificial one that works better? (This isn't hard; natural languages are desperately inefficient.) Naturalistic conlangs appeal to speakers of the languages they're based on, but sacrifice neutrality and ease of instruction. Those based on a logical structure, called "schematic," may be more readily learned, but they forfeit the political support of peoples who speak similar languages, since there aren't any.
Interestingly, all the current contenders for Universal Language are written in Roman characters, and most have Western-based vocabularies. This is because conlangs are a uniquely Western hobby. Scholars elsewhere are apparently less drawn to them, thus few conlangs are inspired by non-Western languages.
Esperanto ("hoping"), unveiled by Ludwig Zamenhof in 1887, has had more success than any other conlang. This is partly because it appeared at an opportune moment, and partly because it strikes an equitable balance between the extremes of naturalism and schematism. A complete and richly expressive tongue, Esperanto can be learned very quickly thanks to its ingenious and rigorously regular structure. Today Esperanto boasts impressive demographics, a growing culture and literature, a Suite101 site, and the support of the Transnational Radical Party for sole working language of the European Union.
Ido (Esperanto for "offspring") is the brainchild of early-century French Esperantists Louis Couturat and Leopold Leau, who felt that Esperanto should resemble Romance languages alone and drop its Slavic, Germanic, Greek, and Hebrew components. Accordingly, Ido sacrifices much of Esperanto's precision and learnability. Idists also axed sounds not found in classical Latin, and in a prescient move, all diacriticals. A distant second to Esperanto to this day, Ido nevertheless enjoys ardent support among speakers.
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