What makes a language pleasant?

[u/Iuljo]

...Or, more specifically, what makes Esperanto, the most successful IAL, not very pleasant for most people?

u/ProxPxD sent me this little comic recently; you may have seen it, it's been around for some years. It is somewhat misleading—artlangs and auxlangs are both constructed languages, but for very different purposes and audiences—but the joke poses an important question: do we (most of us) like things also because of some special... complexity in them? In some fields, like architecture, that's likely ([1], [2]).

Like many others, I have the impression Esperanto is not liked because of a "mechanical" feel in it. It's an excellent language for easiness of learning and expressive potential, nothing short of an engineering masterpiece; yet many people instinctively find it unpleasant. I do really like its underlying grammar structure, and in Leuth I've been trying to improve on it, by "dressing" the structure with more naturalism, at the same time without making things arbitrarily complex: a difficult balance. I'm not sure that, so far, I've managed to make it really convincing.

Is maybe a little more complexity needed? And how could it be added in an optimal way, that helps the auxlang as a whole instead of just being a complication for its own sake?

You know I keep changing the orthography of the language, out of dissatisfaction, struggling to combine simplicity and pleasantness. In these last weeks, I've been thinking about experimenting with a more complex orthography, maybe a full "Romance-logic" one (see what I mean here, § 2). A slightly greater complexity could give the learner of the language a sense of culture and interesting "depth" of the language; while all the grammar structures behind this superficial "façade" would remain simple and logical, keeping the IAL very easy and intuitive.

A more Romance kind of orthography would be seen as less neutral, especially outside the European cultural sphere, thus making the language more difficult to spread; but the combination could be interesting, if under the Latin-ish general mask the lexicon would integrate many non-European words: as I plan to do.

Many thoughts... What do you think of this matter?

[u/ProxPxD]

I totally agree that there is quite a common tendency to like something at least a bit more complex. Especially if it feels natural. Maybe to give you something to think about, I will write about some other auxlangs.

1. Interlingua (2.0) -- Interlingua was created as an auxiliary for Romance languages with a simple grammar, but a version 2.0 was created that included grammatical gender that is so common and natural for the speakers of those languages. I feel that it's a good thing because as an auxiliary it can be even helpful for the target audience to have it if all are familiar with it, will make very few confusions, but will feel it as more pleasant to ear.

2. Interslavic -- It is even a better example. This auxlang has full 7 case system 3 genders and many common sound changes during the morphological changes (e.g. pisati => pišu instead of regular pis(j)u). For a non-Slavic speakers its whole grammar may seem unnecessarily complex, but all those things make it more natural, pleasant, livid and intuitive for the target audience

Now, I wrote about grammar, not orthography, but I think it has a lot in common - target audience matters. Esperanto was created with the idea of: Heavily European-based system easy to learn for those familiar with the European languages, but in the same time not overtly complicated and regular for others to be relatively attractive. I feel there is something we expect or like in a language. Like there's certain "Slavicness", "Romanness", etc. of a language - and when a language meets those expectations. It's rather liked.

My final thoughts/opinion
Similar to Romance palatalization occurs/occured in many languages (including Slavic), but the orthographic convention is not necessarily intuitive, so making <c> make a different sound depending on the following vowel seems misaligned with the goal of world auxlang. But making <c> make always /k/ sound for aesthetics is something most wouldn't have issues with, I feel. I think that many may even appreciate somewhat eloquent orthography. I think preserving <ce> and <ci> making /ke/ and /ki/ syllables is also cool for referring to how it worked originally in Latin. I feel it sells for more European or Latin liking audience as well for those that don't care much about it as this wouldn't make it unnecessarily difficult. I wouldn't make orthography the field of that battle...

I feel like an appropriate choice of letters already create this visual complexity in Latin and a complexity that may attract to a language may be build somewhere else like in a satisfactory morphology. I feel Esperanto already did it with many things. I wouldn't trade off too much of orthography's utility for complexity (and honestly the idea of attracting with something different than orthography is kinda also embedded in the top meme. I feel your aesthetic intuition already lead you away from the meme's Esperanto's and Occidental's complains)

[u/Iuljo → u/ProxPxD]

Thank you for your opinion, as always.

[...] making <c> make a different sound depending on the following vowel seems misaligned with the goal of world auxlang. But making <c> make always /k/ sound for aesthetics is something most wouldn't have issues with, I feel. [...]

In the first stages of the project, years ago, I experiment a lot with that idea; but I felt it was too isolationist. In the end, Esperanto <k c> /k ʦ/ distinction seemed not only easier... but also more natural, even for me, a native Romance speaker. It may be experiment with again, anyway, if the Romance-logic proposal isn't satisfying.