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I feel less and less comfortable with the incoherence of natural languages, so I'm looking for a constructed language that suits me.

  1. semantically close words must share a common affix (not like biology and mathematics in English which are sciences but do not have the same suffix),
  2. vocabulary must be finite and relatively small (a few hundred or thousand words would be fine) with no synonyms,
  3. grammar must be fully regular.
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  • 2
    2 and 3 — toki pona. 1 and 3 — esperanto.
    – Victor VosMottor
    Jul 27 '20 at 13:08
  • Well, in Esperanto biology is biologio but mathematics is matematiko
    – user966
    Jul 27 '20 at 13:10
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    No worries. I don't think math is considered a science anyway.
    – elemtilas
    Jul 27 '20 at 20:19
  • 1
    Lojban?
    – Jeff Zeitlin
    Jul 27 '20 at 22:10
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    Re: Lojban. 1) Gismu (root words) do not have this property, though fu'ivla (drives words) might. 2) There is a small set of gismu and cmavo (particles), but a potentially unbounded set of fu'ivla which could include words that are four all-intensive porpoises synonyms. Though mistakes like the one in the previous sentence are supposedly impossible in Lojban, which lacks homophones and ambiguous phonology. 3) This definitely, though the grammar is truly unlike any other.
    – Andrew Ray
    Jul 28 '20 at 2:33
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I think it should be toki pona. Reasons:

semantically close words must share a common affix (not like biology and mathematics in English which are sciences but do not have the same suffix)

In toki pona, every science has a compound noun word beginning from sona. Biology is sona jan and Mathematics is sona nanpa. (Physics is sona lon and Linguistics is sona toki.)

This is due to the fact that toki pona has a limited vocabulary; so, to form words like "physics", it simply says the phrase "science of existence" or sona lon.

vocabulary must be finite and relatively small (a few hundred or thousand words would be fine) with no synonyms

The vocabulary is just 123 words. Almost all of these are polysemantic, there's nothing like synonyms.

grammar must be fully regular

Grammar is not fully regular, but that's only because of the fact that toki pona has a few words. However, there are not that many exceptions, as in any language like English or Spanish. I have studied 12 lessons of the official book and till then, the only irregularity is the fact that li doesn't follow mi and sina.

In all, the language satisfying (1) and (2) and partly (3) to its fullest is toki pona.

Another close competitor is Esperanto. It totally satisfies (2) and (3) and partly (1). (Some semantically similar words don't seem to have common affixes in them.)

So, in all, if you are looking for such a language, go definitely for toki pona or Esperanto.

PS. Even I felt the same (unable to successfully learn natural languages due to the several irregularities) and thus myself decided to go for toki pona first (because I already know a lot about it) and then Esperanto.

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The best one that I've seen is probably Esperanto. It has a relatively small vocabulary that makes up a great bulk of the words and there are different affixes that change the meanings of words. For example, bo- is used in front of any family member to make it '-in-law' (boonklo, bopatro, bofrato, &c are uncle-in-law, father-in-law, brother-in-law) The language is perfectly regular with no exceptions once you learn the quirks of the grammar. I see above in the comments that somebody said that they didn't like Esperanto but it doesn't look like it's the OP, so I'll leave the suggestion here anyway.

If you want minimalism is the goal, then I definitely suggest toki pona which has only has 120-125 words. There's a varation of that called toki ma which has closer to 300, but there's a lot of overlap with vocabulary.

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