Yes, it is ridiculous "more good" is spelt "better". I am unsure whether the exact form of "doubleplusgood" is optimal, but something like that makes perfect sense.

Given that China successfully adopted simplified Chinese characters, English-speaking world is perfectly capable of adopting Newspeak, and it will bring long term benefit, just as simplified Chinese characters did. But like many long term beneficial things it won't happen due to short term cost.

>Yes That's a myopic view of language. Changes like "better" --> "more good" don't last for long as irregularities will naturally form, making your "optimal" language yet another legacy constraint.

Besides, the vast majority of complexity of language exists because they carry semantic meaning. For example, the redundancy in the terms "Pig" and "Pork" might have initially been due to a need to signal sophistication, but they survive in modern usage because it's a concise way to differentiate the animal from the meat.

>Given that China successfully adopted simplified Chinese characters Simplified characters are more on par with spelling changes than newspeak. It only reduces the stroke count of certain radicals, it doesn't make any changes to the underlying vocabulary or grammar, whereas both newspeak and phonetic writing would.

Standardizing or simplifying the language adopted as lingua franca is a common practice. English is actually an exception in this respect. For example, see Bahasa Indonesia, which can be considered Malay newspeak, and very successful.

Yes, and that standardized lingua franca invariably splinters off and becomes less regular. Compare medieval Latin to the modern Romance languages.

> invariably

Well, we do have more TV and travel today than in prior millennia. Languages are dying out, while there are more people than ever. Let's see where the development goes.