[andolanra]

The thing Interslavic is doing has also been tried before, but the illustrative example isn't Esperanto (which is an ad-hoc mixture of words taken arbitrarily from existing languages and put into a synthetic grammar) but rather Interlingua, which is a kind of streamlined Romance language. It too is more-or-less comprehensible by people who speak any Romance language, and was intended to be used in much the same way. In fact, to quote the creator of Interlingua writing in Interlingua:

    Le sol facto que importa (ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme) es que
    interlingua, gratias a su ambition de reflecter le homogeneitate cultural e ergo
    linguistic del occidente, es capace de render servicios tangibile a iste precise
    momento del historia del mundo. Il es per su contributiones actual e non per le
    promissas de su adherentes que interlingua vole esser judicate.

(Edit: to translate for non-Romance speakers, this means, "The only important fact (from the point of view of Interlingua itself) is that Interlingua, thanks to its goal of reflecting the cultural—and therefore linguistic—homogeneity of the West, is capable of providing tangible services at this precise moment in the history of the world. It is for its actual contributions, and not the promises of its adherents, that Interlingua wishes to be judged.")

It too has met with only limited success: there were some short-lived scientific publications in Interlingua, for example, for the intended audience of all Romance-speaking scientists. Even so, it never attracted much of an audience. That's not to say such a thing could never happen: merely that it's not unreasonable to be pessimistic here.

[barry-cotter]

Please don’t indent quoted text as code. It makes reading on mobile a chore and isn’t great on desktop either. Use

> Le sol facto que importa (ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme) es que interlingua, gratias a su ambition de reflecter le homogeneitate cultural e ergo linguistic del occidente, es capace de render servicios tangibile a iste precise momento del historia del mundo. Il es per su contributiones actual e non per le promissas de su adherentes que interlingua vole esser judicate.

[lacampbell]

Instead use markdown which HN doesn't support? :P

Grandparents was easier to read than yours. Turn your phone sideways

[Shorel]

Native Spanish speaker here: I only needed to read the translation for the last three words.

They did quite a good job. :)

But a language also needs an army (or a central bank, or both).

[tasogare]

As a French, the text is also really easy to understand, except for the two words "vole esser". That being said, writing in this language would still require months of learning.

[otto2]

As non-native speaker of Spanish and French, the text is easily understandable, more so than written Portuguese or Italian.

[poloniculmov]

As a romanian, I only had issues with the last 3 words, though I did have a hunch that judicate is something about judgements.

[ozzmotik]

i don't particularly speak any romance language, but that being said, i still more or less had a vague understanding of what was being said. granted, there was a period of my life where I studied several different world languages, back when I was obsessed with linguistics, and even though I don't speak really any of them with any fluency, it would seem that through osmosis i at least gained an appreciation of some fundamental etymological patterns across those languages