Sometimes I think something gets talked about in science fiction and then it gets stuck in people's heads.

Harry Harrison talked about Esperanto in the "Stainless Steel Rat" books and that is why it is so much better known than Interlingua

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua

which is really a cleaned-up Latin that you might already know how to read if you've been exposed to Romance languages much at all.