From my experience with learning several foreign languages, morphological irregularities look scary in the beginning, but they completely pale in comparison with the complexity and irregularity of syntax and semantics.

I agree. However, making something look less scary in the beginning still constitutes an improvement from a pedagogical point of view. The more quickly you can learn the basic morphology and lexicon, the sooner you can begin the process of intuiting the higher-level rules and social conventions that govern larger units of discourse.

However, the whole point is that in order to speak in a way that will sound natural and grammatical to fluent speakers, you have to internalize all those incredibly complicated points of syntax and semantics, which have developed naturally with time.

Due to a large amount of basic structure common to all human language, it's usually not that hard to learn how to sound grammatical. The difficult part of acquiring a new language is learning how to sound idiomatic. And this basically amounts to learning a new set of social conventions. So there may not be much that language-planning per se can do to facilitate this aspect of language-learning -- which may be a large part of your point. But I would emphasize that the issue here is more sociological than linguistic: it isn't that the structure of the human language apparatus prevents us from creating languages that are easier to learn than existing natural languages -- after all, existing languages are not optimized for ease of learning, especially as second languages. It's just that constructing a grammar is not the same as constructing the conventions and norms of a speech community, and the latter may be a more difficult task.

(Even when it comes to inflectional morphology, assuming a lively community of Esperanto speakers persists into the future, how long do you think it will take before common contractions start grammaticalizing into rudimentary irregular inflections?)

This kind of drift will presumably happen given enough time, but it's worth noting that (for obvious reasons) Esperantists tend to be more disciplined about maintaining the integrity of the language than is typical among speakers of most languages, and they've been pretty successful so far.

I may have read too much into the first and second sentences of your post - I felt that you were suggesting that the only way for us to achieve sufficient rationality to work on FAI or solve important problems would be to start using Lojban (or similar) all the time.

So my response to using a language purely for working on FAI is much the same as Vladimir's - sounds like you're talking more about a set of conventions like predicate logic or maths notation than a language per se. Saddling it with the 'language' label is going to lead to lots of excess baggage, because languages as a whole need to do a lot of work.

It sounds like you've discussed this with others in the past

It's the argument nearly anyone with any linguistic knowledge will have with countless people who think that language would be so much better if it was less ambiguous and we could just say exactly what we meant all the time. No convenient links though, sad to say

It still seems to me that correct answers to the big problems do require a rigid logical map

Such as decision theories?

Oops, I want back to edit and forgot to write the rest of that paragraph.

I was going to say, supporting borrowing means you need to retain all the borrowable word forms - nouns, adjectives, and verbs - which rules out some extra-radical possibilities, like making a language where verbs are a closed set and actions are represented by nouns. But to my knowledge no natural languages do that, so that's not much of a restriction.

If you build an artificial word language, you could make it in such a way that it would drive its own evolution in a useful way. A few examples:

• If you make a rule available to derive a word easily, it would be less likely that the user would coin a new one.
• If you also build a few other languages with a similar sound structure, you could make it super easy to coin new words without messing up the sound system.
• If you make the sound system flow well enough, it would be unlikely that anybody would truncate the words to make it easier to pronounce or whatever.

I don't understand how you could dismiss it out of hand that you could build a language that wouldn't lose its superior qualities. There are a ton of different ways to make the engine defend itself in that regard. People mess with the English sound system only to make it flow better, and there's no reason why you couldn't just make an artificial language which already flows well enough.

Also, I'm not gonna try to convert the masses to my artificial language. In normal life, we spend a lot of our time using English to try to do something other than get the other person to think the same thought. We try to impress people, we try to get people to get us a glass of water, etc. I'm not interested in building a language for that kind of communication. All I'm interested in is building a language for what we try to do here on LW: reproduce our thought process in the other person's head.

But what that means is that the "wild" needn't be so wild. If the only people who use the artificial language are 1,000 people like you and me, I don't see why we couldn't retain its superior structure. I don't see why I would take a perfectly good syntax and start messing with it. It would be specialized for one purpose: reproducing one's thoughts in another's head, especially for deep philosophical issues. We would probably use English in a lot of our posts! We would probably use a mix of English and the artificial language.

My response ("how are you so sure of all that stuff") probably wasn't very constructive, so I apologize. Perhaps I should have asked for an example of an artificial language that transformed into an irregular natural one. Since you probably would have mentioned Esperanto, I'll respond to that. Basically, Esperanto was a partially regularized mix and match of a bunch of different natural language components. I have no interest in building a language like that.

Languages like Esperanto are still in the "natural language paradigm"; they're basically just like idealized natural languages. But I have a different idea. If I build an artificial word language, its syntax won't resemble any natural language that you've seen. At least not in that way. Actually, it would probably be more to the point to simply say that Esperanto was built for a much different reason. It's a mix and match of a bunch of natural language components, and people use it like they use a natural language. It's not surprising that it lost some of its regularity.

I'm getting pretty messy in this post, but I simply don't have a concise response to this topic. Everywhere I go, people seem to have that same idea about artificial language. They say that we're built for natural language, and either artificial language is impossible, or it would transform into natural language. I really just don't know where people get that idea. How could we conceive of and build an artificial language, but at the same time be incapable of using it? That seems like a totally bizarre idea. Maybe I don't understand it or something.