[_vdpp]

Why not bring back Latin? The alphabet is already in wide use, many languages evolved from it making it easy-ish for them to learn, and Latin was already in wide use as the lingua franca for academia and the church up until the 1700s.

[droobles]

Latin never went anywhere! Carpe Diem, ad hoc, et al. I love learning more about Latin, and while it would be cool to be as fluent as possible as a speaker, I really love parsing and consuming Latin texts, I learn so much not only about history or religion but also just about our current society and language habits.

The answer with Latin is obviously the cases, imho Spanish would be my vote for a lingua franca – simple, phonetic, sounds beautiful with any accent sung or spoken, and already has massive influence and history.

[mynegation]

Seriously though. I found myself once on Interlingua TikTok and had a shocking experience of understanding the speaker almost entirely but not recognizing the language. Vocabulary was close to Spanish (that I have basic knowledge of), but declension and overall flow was more like Italian (that I do not speak). I also could speak French long ago, but not anymore so that may have helped as well.

[leoc]

If you want to try your luck with Latin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C77anb2DJGk . Or you could head straight to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09L7bge0w4Q or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7hd799IznU&list=PLU1WuLg45S... !