Globasa

One cool thing about IALs is that they have a pretty clear genealogy. Esperanto gave rise to Otto Jespersen's Novial, which tried to distance itself a bit from its predecessor's focus on Romance languages. If you're interested, you can read a digitization of Jespersen's 1928 book "An International Language" here. From Novial sprang Lingwa de Planeta, or Lidepla for short, which strove to internationalize itself even further by cutting further down on grammar and including non-European languages as sources for vocabulary. Unfortunately, in practice, the bulk of its vocab tended to come from either English, Mandarin, or Hindi, and its reluctance to depart too much from Novial prevented it from being truly excellent.

Globasa, debuting in 2019, is what Lidepla would be if it were good. It has much more source languages hailing from a wide array of families, and boy does it use them. Its vocabulary comes from all over the world, and it's not just picked at random, either; the team in charge of building up the lexicon does its due diligence and compares how a given concept is expressed in all the source languages, settling on a form that would be most familiar to most people.

And it does all this while paying scrupulous attention to phonology and phonotactics, too. Globasa's consonant inventory is carefully selected to be manageable for people of all linguistic backgrounds. For instance, take plosive consonants like /p/, /t/, and /k/. Natural languages tend to supplement those with a second set. In many European languages, those would be their voiced counterparts: /b/, /d/, and /g/. However, outside of Europe, there's plenty of languages whose second set of plosives are still unvoiced, but aspirated this time. That is, you say them with a little puff of air. Ektor recognized this and designed Globasa such that it has both unvoiced and voiced plosives, but the unvoiced ones are also aspirated. That way, speakers who struggle with the aspiration distinction can set their plosives apart with the voicedness distinction, and vice versa.

Another savvy move was what it did with the letter r. That little letter has always stymied auxlangers. You absolutely need it if you want words to be recognizable to speakers of the languages they came from, but the problem is that there's so much variation in how languages pronounce it. Most IALs default to the alveolar trill (the rolled one from Spanish), though concede that speakers are really allowed to pronounce it however they want. Understandable, considering that the alveolar trill is the most common rhotic sound. But Globasa defaults to the marginally less common alveolar tap, like the t in "liter." The reasoning is simple: no matter who you are, there's a good chance you can pronounce at least one of them. But while it's simple for people with the trill to learn the tap (assuming they couldn't do it already), it's much harder for people with the tap to learn the trill. I took six years of Spanish in school, and I still never got the hang of it.

The rest of Globasa's consonants are also shrewdly chosen, and there are very careful rules in place to govern which can appear where. On top of that, the language avoids minimal pairs wherever it can, ensuring that every word is nice and distinct. It's not perfect; it still allows <h> to occur at the end of a syllable, meaning English speakers have to either learn the /x/ sound or learn to make the /h/ sound at the end of a syllable, among other less-than-ideal choices. But these are minor flaws in an otherwise brilliant phonology.

For its grammar, Globasa goes as minimal as possible, eschewing inflections and making up for them with strict word order. This takes a page from the book of creole languages, which also have minimal grammar. Since creoles develop naturally between people of different linguistic backgrounds, clearly a grammar based mostly on word order must be a good solution for bridging that gap.

Globasa also features a word formation system a la Esperanto, but to be honest, I feel a bit mixed about such endeavors. Sure, they're a tempting way to cut down on root words, but the problem is that different cultures are invariably going to have different ways of defining the same things. English and German call TVs "farseers," but there's any number of other concepts you could reasonably build "TV" out of. What's obvious to one person might not be obvious to others, and even if you allow many different ways of saying the same thing, one of them is absolutely going to dominate and become lexicalized. At that point, word formation systems go from ways to coin new vocabulary to simple sources of mnemonics for understanding what's set in stone. So many of the Globasa team's compound words fall perfectly in line with how people of the English-speaking world would conceptualize them that sometimes I wonder just how international those compounds really are.

Maybe I'm just overthinking it. At the very least, Globasa doesn't rely on word formation nearly as much as Esperanto does. Which is good, since words can get quite long and unwieldy when you assemble them out of too many parts. But one thing about Globasa that is unquestionably a problem is its unfortunate dearth of learning material. The closest thing it has is a twenty-lesson course on its official website, but that barely gets you through the basics of the basics. It needs something better. Either a longer and more in-depth course or a graded reader. Preferably both. It's obviously possible to learn the language without a course to hold your hand, as evidenced by how proficient some people are in it, but it needs high-quality learning material if it wants to be more accessible.

Nevertheless, there's no denying it's an excellent language. If you're interested in learning more, go poke around its official website. It has everything you could ever need to know, and then some.