[scythe]

Spanish is a beautiful language, I speak some myself, it's probably better than Esperanto or the more European-focused Interlingua, but... consider the number of forms of a regular verb:

(lavar (present lavo lavas lava lavamos lavan) (past lavé lavaste lavó lavámos lavarón) (imperfect lavaba lavabas lavabamos lavaban) (future lavaré lavarás lavará lavaramos lavarán) (conditional lavaría lavarías lavaríamos lavarían) (present-subjunctive lave laves lavemos laven) (gerund lavando) (participle lavado))

And that's ignoring the twenty or so irregular verbs and roughly ten "irregular" patterns (e.g. querer). It's a lot simpler than French or Italian, to be sure, or Latin, for that matter, but it could be a lot easier.

[notahacker]

That's not to mention that Spanish is deletive so those sometimes subtly different verb conjugations are often the only way of conveying the subject of the sentence. It seems much more optimised for speaking rápidamente than listening, especially for non-native speakers.

If you were designing a language from scratch you also wouldn't choose features like the unnecessary grammatical gender (even though it's relatively consistent and easy to get right) and the b/v distinction in the orthography that's unpronounced in most dialects.

On paper it's still a far, far better auxiliary language than English though (I wouldn't be surprised to live to see a day when most people worldwide speak a regularised English with much more basic grammar and sensible orthography one day though; it's easier to build momentum taking the second language people are most exposed to as the starting point)

[lloeki]

Every time I encounter irregular verb forms, I remember I have a personal hunch for Japanese (basically a handful of exceptions and only two tenses). The leverage of context is powerful and concise in a way strangely similar to Perl. Also I can't decide if their way of typed counting is brilliant or cumbersome. As for writing systems, I have a particular hunch for Hangul.

I wish it would be as easy to prototype human languages as it is for software...