[mjevans]

The English language is broken by design and historical practice with respect to spelling (borrowing when it needed to steal) and grammar; though it may possibly not be as broken as other historical languages.

Also, before you propose something like Esperanto; that language appears to be the antithesis of what I'd prefer as a replacement. The general design goals being more:

* a 'RISC' (rather than CISC) style use of verbal pallet (pick the most common international phonetics, not a regional 'good enough' set)

* purely phonetic spelling and pronunciation (one exact way to spell or say anything and vice versa)

* never mutate words for any reason (no tenses, conjugation, etc)

* no pronouns (only use proper nouns or descriptive selections)

* eliminate filler where possible (the, a, similar non-informational words); this would be more of an accepted grammar shift. If there is a reason for that use then more distinct and/or obvious reasons for using a replacement mechanism should be apparent and taught in standard education.

[amanaplanacanal]

As a language, English is probably as good as you are going to get. I has been simplifying for hundreds (thousands?) of years, and is fairly closely related to the languages spoken by most of the developed world, which makes it easier to learn.

The spelling is pretty bad, though. I'm guessing that even if you managed to clean up the spelling, it would be a temporary fix. Pronunciations change over time, and vary between dialects.

[sorokod]

That is just not how human languages work. To take one example,phonetic spelling was the only spelling in "Old English" ( roughly pre 1066 ). Naturally it was all over the place due to variations in pronounciation e.g "daughter" and "knight" are spelled the way they are exactly because of that.

[linux2647]

Maybe something like Toki Pona? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona

[mjevans]

It seems close to my goals, but violates one of the main ones related to lowering the entry barrier.

All the letter (and sounds) used NEED to be pronounced, the same way, for native speakers of English, French, Russian, Spanish, and also various major (eastern) Asian languages. That means that when an otherwise uneducated (in languages/reading the squiggly version of words from a dictionary) user in one of those languages tries to read one of the words it should sound like only a slight accent, not a major flub.

J should never have been used.

"14 Latin letters, a e i j k l m n o p s t u w, are used to write the language. They have the same values as in the International Phonetic Alphabet:[38] j sounds like English y, and the vowels are like those of Spanish or Italian. Capital initials are used to mark proper adjectives, while Toki Pona roots are always written with lowercase letters, even when they start a sentence.[39]"

--

Edit about the difference in vowels/etc: If there isn't a common ground in notation for symbols, then the writing for the language CAN'T map back to any existing phonetic symbol system either. It MAY use existing non-phonetic symbols and assign new uses for them, but it MUST NOT reuse such symbols that have conflicted mappings in existing languages.

[dragonwriter]

> All the letter (and sounds) used NEED to be pronounced, the same way, for native speakers of English, French, Russian, Spanish, and also various major (eastern) Asian languages.

Do you mean all the phonemes need to be present in all of the referenced languages, or that they need to be indicated by the same letter or letter combination in each language? Because, the former doesn't leave a lot, and the latter is even worse, even if you choose the most popular current transliteration for those languages for which the Latin alphabet isn't the usual one.

[naniwaduni]

> All the letter (and sounds) used NEED to be pronounced, the same way, for native speakers of English, French, Russian, Spanish, and also various major (eastern) Asian languages. That means that when an otherwise uneducated (in languages/reading the squiggly version of words from a dictionary) user in one of those languages tries to read one of the words it should sound like only a slight accent, not a major flub.

This constraint effectively removes vowels from your phonetic inventory.

[jfk13]

And it's going to be tough to find common ground with the Russians and East Asians, whose native writing systems don't even use the Latin alphabet.

[vel0city]

Ever look at Esperanto? Every word is pronounced how it is spelled.