The problem with the idea of a neutral International Auxiliary Language is that the minute it was actually adopted and used would be the minute it would stop being a neutral language. It wouldn’t be a neutral language anymore, but rather the language of the internationalist new world order united nations rootless cosmopolitan busybodies.
Ah, but as long as those people came from every country on Earth, no country would have an unfair advantage! Just… ignore that 10% of Chinese learning it versus 10% of Romanians learning it is still rather a numbers game, eh? We’re marching, marching, to Shibboleth!
What gets me is the people who brag about how Esperanto has been some people’s mother tongue. That goes against the whole point of an artificial IAL! An artificial IAL isn’t meant to be a mother tongue because it isn’t meant to have a culture. It’s meant to be an airport, not a family home, and it’s meant to be just as foreign to everyone on Earth.
The above point pretty much kills Esperanto’s uptake: If it is to be used as it’s meant to be used, it can’t have any reason to be used except as an IAL. No poetry, no novels, no feature films starring William Shatner, nothing. All of that implies a community which uses it day-to-day, a culture of people who are privileged above new learners, and who would, therefore, be imperialistic were they to spread their language. And in terms of imperialistic IALs, Esperanto was beaten to the punch multiple times over, over the course of thousands of years, in pretty much every region on Earth, from the Vietnamese and their Chữ Nôm (not to mention having Classical Chinese be their literary language) to Rome and Latin to the British Empire and English.
I always sleep with a .75-calibre Gyrojet and a couple of smoke grenades under my pillow; when the Esperantist imperial stormtroopers break down my door in order to haul me off to a re-education camp, they are in for a rude surprise.
Except that in the process of becoming “workable”, a language will necessarily be exposing itself to muddle and distortion. Constant innovation, including innovation by people who misunderstand or even dislike the language, is an essential feature, not a problem.
The point of an artificial language is that it’s prescriptive, which means it has an unchallengeable authority which people actually listen to, as opposed to the unchallengeable authority on the French language that French people, for example, largely ignore in day-to-day life. Therefore, it won’t evolve due to use any more than centimeters or kilograms evolve due to use. It will be the Perfect Modern Language, without a past, without a country, and without dialect or accent, as rational as the General Assembly Building, with a floorplan laid out by compass and ruler.
The fact the real International Auxiliary Language is a natural language which grew, as all natural languages grew, via a random confluence of politics and migration to become, as all natural languages become, a completely unruly farrago of borrowed vocabulary and mutated grammar says something rather uncomplimentary about the Modernist Vision I outlined above.