It sounds like a good idea, but we humans have a way of making any language that is capable of expressing anything like nuance into local, parochial varieties if we spend time living in the language. Pronunciation will shift, elisions and contractions are going to happen, and the perfect match between orthography and pronunciation will evaporate. Sure, you can adjust the spelling to keep up, but whose dialect is the "real" one? Irregularities will creep in. There will be a tendency to push and pull the word order (and long lists of conjugation and declension affixes that may overcome word order difficulties would be a barrier to use). Oh, yeah: about word order... whose do you use? SVO is common among creoles, but that has as much to do with the vocabulary source languages as anything else (even if it can be argued that SVO is the least marked case). If enough people use the new language often enough for it to be a real breaker of barriers, that will be a relatively short-lived phenomenon. If it is merely a lingua franca, it will be about as expressive as a pidgin in most mouths, and pidgins don't say much on paper (or on screen).
Bilingualism (or multilingualism) isn't the problem, especially if the languages are acquired early. It's keeping a "standard language" (that's worthy of the name) standard. If people use it, it will change, and those changes will be local (geographically regional, or the internet equivalent). Artificial grammars are just about as real as Bishop Lowth's version of English grammar; a heavily-used constructed language will drift toward a grammar that actually makes human sense, with all of the quirks and foibles that implies. It doesn't take long for the divergence to become significant. A couple-three decades, and you'll have distinct dialects. A couple-three centuries, and they stop being completely mutually comprehensible. A little more time and you'll be looking around for the wreckage of the tower.
Comments
It sounds like a good idea, but we humans have a way of making any language that is capable of expressing anything like nuance into local, parochial varieties if we spend time living in the language. Pronunciation will shift, elisions and contractions are going to happen, and the perfect match between orthography and pronunciation will evaporate. Sure, you can adjust the spelling to keep up, but whose dialect is the "real" one? Irregularities will creep in. There will be a tendency to push and pull the word order (and long lists of conjugation and declension affixes that may overcome word order difficulties would be a barrier to use). Oh, yeah: about word order... whose do you use? SVO is common among creoles, but that has as much to do with the vocabulary source languages as anything else (even if it can be argued that SVO is the least marked case). If enough people use the new language often enough for it to be a real breaker of barriers, that will be a relatively short-lived phenomenon. If it is merely a lingua franca, it will be about as expressive as a pidgin in most mouths, and pidgins don't say much on paper (or on screen).
Bilingualism (or multilingualism) isn't the problem, especially if the languages are acquired early. It's keeping a "standard language" (that's worthy of the name) standard. If people use it, it will change, and those changes will be local (geographically regional, or the internet equivalent). Artificial grammars are just about as real as Bishop Lowth's version of English grammar; a heavily-used constructed language will drift toward a grammar that actually makes human sense, with all of the quirks and foibles that implies. It doesn't take long for the divergence to become significant. A couple-three decades, and you'll have distinct dialects. A couple-three centuries, and they stop being completely mutually comprehensible. A little more time and you'll be looking around for the wreckage of the tower.
That was all before The Network. Those problems won't happen now.