Re: One language for the world

Barry a écrit :

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Question on Bahasa Indonesia: is the lexicon mainly from one Indonesian
language? In other words, how did they come up with the lexicon for the
language?
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they took vocab from Malay + Javanese + some other local langs.
that makes a lot of Arabic and Sanskrit/Pali words too.

Same problem as for Tagalog : Bahasa Indonesia is felt a dominating
Javanese lang. I could hardly speak B. in Bali and Sumatra
because young people would immediately switch to English to train,
to show off and to avoid speaking B. although they were obviously fluent in
it.
But Javanese speak B. very readily and that's maybe why B.'s
vocabulary is now mainly Javanese although a big part of
the civil service is trusted by non-Javanese like the Minangkabau.
I also had the feeling that Indonesians don't care so much about B.
because the grammar is so easy that you really don't need to
put much effort to learn it whatever your nationality is.
It is certainly considered everywhere as inferior to local
classical langs like Javanese, Bugis, Balinese, etc. which are really
difficult
to learn and that's why there is very little written in B. except for a host
of legal stuff. the vocabulary is really messy now because people
use their own local vocabulary and don't know whether a local word is
also regular B. or not.

OBCONLANG:
I think that B. is a good example of an auxlang experiment.
B. is easier than any other available lang including English,
the vocabulary is pretty large and mixes Arabic and Indian words
understood everywhere in the region.
but people would rather learn English because it is spoken by rich
foreigners.
you can make your own auxlang just as difficult as you want--
as French, Russian, Latin, etc.-- provided it is the richest ones'.
or else make sure your people can't access rich countries' langs.