Trüth, Beaüty, and Volapük (2012)

My trouble is that whatever material I used to learn it (mainly Kurso de Esperanto and a course on lernu!) seemed to be completely detached from the way most people seem to actually write. Lots of suffixes I've never seen used in the learning material are abundantly used in the real world.

All of this to say, where do I go to learn a bit better?

Vi ne estas tiom unika, kiom vi pensas ;)

You're not as unique as you think ;)

> Jes, mi jam pruvis, ke la lingvo povas esti uzita en teĥnikaj konceptoj.

Ĉiuj lingvoj povas esti uzataj por teĥnikaĵoj, ĉu ne? (Nu, eble krom toki pona)

All languages can be used for technical things, aren't they? (Well, maybe except tiki pona)

Also, what you point is not the whole light about Zamenhof and Esperanto reform attempts: at some point he did try to (reluctantly) bring some reform himself, but it was rejected by the community[1]. And this was only 6 years after Esperanto was released into the wild.

I can’t help but think about how tab was frozen into Makefiles "a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base"[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto [2] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/20292/why...

Some Latin-based alphabets such as Turkish and Eastern European specifically attempted to solve this problem (e.g. use [Ç] instead of [ch] in Turkish or [Š] instead of [sh] in Czech et al). You may not consider digraph usage a problem, but historically, for some reason, many alphabet designers went this route.

So, from this perspective it doesn't hold true English seems the most suitable for Latin alphabet.

I think quite the opposite, Latin alphabet completely lacks the resources English needs to present its vowels consistently.

Spanish has a few more letters and more accents. But the correspondence between spelling and pronounciation is amazing. And you always know which syllable to stress thanks to the acute accents on the vowels.

EDIT: Sibling comment mentioned Turkish. Turkish also has very regular spelling apparently (my impression and what someone has told me). And they apparently needed those extra letters in order to achieve that.

It would take a while to learn to read in rot13. Now, add in that I am learning the language, and learning Spanish in rot13 would be hard for me.

English as commonly written using the Latin alphabet is objectively an awful fit, because one cannot tell how a word is pronounced from how it is written. One has to memorize the proper pronunciation of hundreds (if not thousands) of words beforehand in order to correctly read a text aloud.

Almost all languages have a few words like that (usually at least some loanwords), but English is quite extreme compared to languages like German, where pronunciation can be trivially inferred from spelling in almost all cases.

So even if written English doesn't have diacritics, it certainly could use some to give readers more information on how something is supposed to be pronounced.

For example, a verb can be just a name of the action, without having multiple forms to express tenses, but then, whenever the action does not have the default tense and aspect, e.g. a present and habitual action, you must accompany the verb with some adverbial particle expressing the intended tense and aspect of the action.

In a similar way, a noun can have the meaning of one or more entities of some kind, of unknown gender. Whenever you have to express that there are 1, 2, few, many or another definite number of entities, or when you want to mention the gender, you should have to add to the noun a numeral or adjective expressing that information.

So you need to express tense, mood, aspect, number, gender, definiteness and so on, but it is possible to do this in a simpler and more systematic way than in any natural language.

Creating the large set of adverbial/adjectival particles that are required to express all these meanings, in such a way that all of them will be short, preferably monosyllabic, while being easy to pronounce and to remember, and while not suggesting undesirable meanings to the speakers of the most widespread natural languages, requires considerable creativity.

Simplifying the grammar would also get rid of a lot of redundancy that exists in the natural languages. In a time when the largest quantities of information are communicated in written form, that redundancy is no longer useful.

Nevertheless, in the original spoken form of the languages, the redundancy was more useful than today. For example, when listening to a story, one might already forget some details about what was said a little while before, so repeating a part of that information in the form of various kinds of agreements between words was more important than when reading the same story, when you can look back at the previous text line, when something is confusing.

What sunk Volapük, and nearly sunk Esperanto too, was the creators' inability to leave good enough alone. They kept reforming it, to the frustration of the people who had actually trusted them enough to learn it (not a small investment, despite the PR). Esperanto at least was community-driven enough to reject Zamenhof's later reforms.

Other than Esperanto, Interlingua, and some fictional languages, there's pretty much just Lojban and Toki Pona, neither of which are at all based on Indo-European languages.