As someone who tinkers with conlangs as a hobby and has been working on a similarly highly-engineered language not unlike ithkuil in features, this is one of th

As someone who tinkers with conlangs as a hobby and has been working on a similarly highly-engineered language not unlike ithkuil in features, this is one of the main things I struggle with. Actual natural language is very fluid. Spelling, pronunciation, grammar, all shift around, and for all manner of reasons. But the main one is efficiency. Humans are always subconsciously trying to cram as much information into as little time as possible, while preserving enough intent. This means extra redundant information whittles away, but there has to be enough redundancy for error correction. With these highly compressed languages, the problem becomes that a slight mispronounciation or misspelling can totally mess with the meaning in ways which lead to confusion. There are just too many phonemic sounds (a given sound difference is phonemic if the distinction matters, eg in English, p and p' (aspiration) is non-phonemic, but in Korean it is) When you actually analyze languages for their "baud rate" so to speak, languages with more symbol diversity (English) have less phonemes per unit time, while languages with less symbol diversity (Italian) have more phonemes, but the overall entropy per unit time works out pretty much the same. (I can't find my exact source right now, but if you poke around keywords like spoken language entropy rate, there's quite a bunch). Basically when you have machine code as a language, you pretty much need machine brain to process it. Edit: here's a start of some sources: https://seantrott.github.io/information/ https://seantrott.github.io/information/ Which mostly cites https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594 Also: re why no conlangs have taken over, momentum is a huge thing. We still have big iron running COBOL. Now imagine you hear COBOL from the moment you are born, for hours a day, you start babbling in COBOL, basically everyone around you converses in COBOL. It would be thoroughly entrenched. There's a reason "English follows other languages down dark alleys, beats them up and rifles through their pockets for vocabulary". It is the lingua franca. It's incredibly flexible and extensible, and combined with superpower hegemony, it dominates. Any dominant language is bound to acrete vocab and eject dead weight (though why we still have dental fricatives is really weird).