I’ve talked about this before but a logographic lingua franca has a lot of potential to create text that is legible in any language. 1000 years ago, the Chinese writing system was used all across East Asia and you didn’t even have to know the spoken Chinese language to read it, even though the sentence order could be totally different.

There are definitely a lot of problems with this idea but I think the positives outweigh the negatives. (And of course, everybody should also keep their own language’s writing system. You could write in a logographic lingua franca if you were expecting to communicate with people who don’t speak your language.)

This is ignoring the geopolitical reasons that English became the worldwide lingua franca and is reverse-engineering the reason from a single example.
Chinese was the lingua franca of the sinosphere for centuries.
Imagine if it was China who had the power and expanse of the British Empire, it’s not like a non-tonal non-logographic language would suddenly appear and become a lingua franca for no reason other than it being easier to learn. That’s just not how lingua francas come to be.

Though you could argue that if Chinese became the worldwide lingua franca, the efforts to romanize/alphabetize it would have more force and the language itself might change. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan all had their own movements to move away from Chinese characters (with VERY different motivations/outcomes in each country).

But I really disagree with your premise that difficulty in learning is what decides a lingua franca.

I get this too. I didn’t think/know it was air pressure though? Seems to happen to me randomly, and rarely.

The fact that five of the “hads” are not semantically the word “had” but rather a quotation makes this one weaker than “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” imo, though you could argue that Buffalo as a proper noun is also kinda cheating.

Dogs are made out of air, water, and dog food.

In the original picture I could only ever see white & gold, but in this photo you post I can see either way.

Alone Again, Naturally by Gilbert O’Sullivan.
A small twist, but a very devastating song

China has an extremely high literacy rate, so the difficulty in learning the system is, at least, provably surmountable.

The strength of being able to unite communication historically across East Asia and potentially around the world is a pretty big plus. Offering such a strength impossible in other systems, ideograms are hardly equivalent to imperial units.

Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese are totally unrelated languages. Chinese languages are sino-tibetan, Vietnamese is austro-asiatic, Japanese is japonic, and Korean is alone in its own family. Totally unrelated to each other as far as we can trace.

Despite that, they all used to use the same writing system and, shockingly, they were mutually intelligible when written down. In Japanese this method of reading Chinese (without actually knowing Chinese) was called kundoku but I think that the other languages also had ways to read & write Chinese writing with very light translation. Even today, Chinese writing unites the different dialects/languages of China.

My proposed lingua franca is the Chinese writing system. Everybody should keep their own writing systems, but they should also learn to transcribe into Chinese, the only extant written language in which this is really possible.

I stopped believing in toki pona when I heard somebody say that “watermelon” would be “kili telo” (fruit [of] water). It goes without saying that “kili telo” would not be understood as “watermelon” unless they had heard it in English before, or heard someone use the English-derived “kili telo”.
If you’re going to use English-language ideas to form words, then English is a prerequisite language for speaking toki pona, and toki pona becomes useless.

I think if toki pona is developed as you describe, it could be much more useful than it is today.

YouTube killed mine recently ;-; what do you use?

The Gregorian calendar is by far the most commonly used calendar in the world, certainly in the English speaking world, and while I don’t particularly care to defend or attack your comment or the original comment, my point stands that the most obvious interpretation of what they said is in the context of the Gregorian calendar and to pretend they meant it outside of that context is silly.

The obvious meaning of someone saying “year 0 doesn’t exist” is that the Gregorian calendar does not have a year 0; the year before 1 AD is 1 BC. It’s not a math thing, it’s a protocol thing.

Your point on consistency is just wrong. There is no reason that “believing years exist” would necessarily imply “believing all numbered years exist”

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but not being able to participate in name-based targeted consumerism is the worst reason I can possibly think of to argue against having a unique name.

I used to be always on vibrate, but then I found out I can schedule do not disturb via calendar events, so I have started leaving my ringer on with it automatically disabling when I don’t want it on.

This is my ringtone: Moment (instrumental) from Marmalade Boy. Watched this anime with my friends and this track is unforgettable. The show is about this girl whose parents divorce and get remarried to another couple who also got divorced, and then she tries to date her step-step-brother who is both her mom’s husband’s son and her dad’s wife’s son.
This track plays any time something dramatic happens, which is like every 5 minutes.

“Learn” and “bird” are pronounced very differently depending on the accent of English. Wiktionary has “learn” RP pronunciation listed as lɜːn and American as lɝn, although personally I don’t believe in ɝ so I would write it as lɹn and bɹd.

Slight rant about American English IPA, but Wiktionary even has American “bird” listed as bɜɹd, which is frankly ridiculous. Say bɜɹd out loud and it sounds absolutely insane. Be’rd. Nobody says bɜɹd, it’s gotta be bɹd. English spelling treats R as a consonant, but American English functionally treats it like a vowel. If we spelled with R the same way it’s pronounced, it would be brd, lrn, teachr, wrking, etc. Not suggesting a spelling reform, because the current system works so well for uniting different accents of English, but it seriously bugs me when people talk about how American R (ɹ) is a consonant. It’s not!

Better to just use browser history, OP could search “YouTube cream” and likely find it. I had to change my settings to stop Firefox from deleting my oldest pages in history though.

Waiting (I’m in a hospital waiting room)

I’m gonna pretty decisively say “no”.
By the very nature of memes, you don’t know if they are talking about real events or just joking, you don’t know who created it or their biases, and you only get an EXTREMELY simplified perspective & information. You are also limiting the news that you see, maybe missing out on something important in favor of something funny (not to imply that we should maximize the amount of news we see).

I disagree with your point B about memes, that they don’t ask you to pick a side. I feel like memes are often more biased than traditional news. Even in cases where news is extremely biased, you can be aware of the bias and judge them consistently because they are not anonymous.