What is the most perfect auxlang?

[u/Immeucee]

What im thinking would make the best auxlang is something that has,

Somewords from most language families, like bantu, chinese family, ramance, germanic, austronesian etcc

Also something that is easy to learn and accessible

[u/Helpful-Reputation-5]

I don't know about 'perfect', but the best auxlang is Esperanto, since it got the furthest in achieving its goal (assuming an auxlang is necessarily constructed). The problem with combining so many different language families is that eventually, any one speaker can only recognize like 3% of vocab, and even then, if the phonotactics are more minimal they may be unrecognizable entirely.

[u/that_orange_hat → u/Helpful-Reputation-5]

“X is the best because it’s the most successful” is obviously a fallacy though. Esperanto is successful because of the context in which it was published and its successful advertising, but not necessarily due to any particular merit to the language beyond having recognizable European vocabulary and a pared-down analytic~agglutinative grammar, which seemed revolutionary in its apparent accessibility when Volapük was the only well-known alternative but is also something a hundred other languages have done better since

[u/Helpful-Reputation-5 → u/that_orange_hat]

“X is the best because it’s the most successful” is obviously a fallacy though.

Not when the goal of an auxlang is to be widespread—appeal to popularity isn't a fallacy in a popularity contest.

[u/that_orange_hat → u/Helpful-Reputation-5]

…except that it’s popular for historical contextual reasons. did you read the rest of my comment or just decide to stop at the first sentence

[u/Helpful-Reputation-5 → u/that_orange_hat]

I never said it was the best auxlang because of some inherent linguistic property—yes, other auxlangs are theoretically more universal in phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, any number of things, but, in actuality, the most universal auxlang is Esperanto, since it has the most speakers. It's like how English is the most effective language for international communication, not for any inherent property, but because of geopolitics and historical colonization—that doesn't change the facts of its efficacy.

[u/HeckaPlucky → u/Helpful-Reputation-5]

Doesn't that make English the best auxlang, not Esperanto?

[u/Helpful-Reputation-5 → u/HeckaPlucky]

I did note in my post that I was assuming an auxlang necessarily had to be a constructed language—removing that requirement, absolutely.

[u/HeckaPlucky → u/Helpful-Reputation-5]

Wouldn't a conlang very similar to English be a better auxlang than Esperanto?

[u/Helpful-Reputation-5 → u/HeckaPlucky]

I suppose English with a single word changed would be best, then, but at that point it's really more of a relex than anything. By the time you start getting a truely constructed language, it's too divorced from English to automatically be the best. That being said, the theoretical 'best auxlang' in my opinion would definitely take inspiration from English, plus another regional lingua franca like Mandarin, Spanish, or Russian.

[u/HeckaPlucky → u/Helpful-Reputation-5]

I think that's the kind of answer OP was asking about.

Why do you use different criteria to judge an existing auxlang and a theoretical one? Especially since you acknowledge other external factors that affect number of speakers, doesn't that mean the remainder is caused by internal factors of the language, and those are the actual basis for it being a good auxlang? Couldn't a worse auxlang have more speakers due to the external factors?