OT: Off shore call center workers mad at American

[dmm]

Regarding a logical universal language:
It won't work. People are too insular, inventive, xenophobic, and obstreperous.
English is a good case in point. Some claim that it has become a lingua franca, but it is not quite correct to say that people in Nigeria or India or China can speak English. What they speak is Nigerian-English or Indian-English or Chinese-English. They can speak it very effectively with one another, which is very helpful in uniting their large countries with many minorities and dialects. But they need extra training to converse readily in English with outsiders. This should not surprise us. Ever try to speak (in English) with someone with a thick Cockney accent, or Southern Appalachian (U.S.) accent? Especially over the phone?
My point is that a lingua franca quickly mutates (degenerates?) into dialects and from there into separate languages. It is almost impossible to stop this process. It can be slowed by imposing a standard on everyone through the educational system, but eventually the standard becomes so far removed from daily life that only the elite use it. Latin and written Chinese are the most obvious examples from history. But even the elite can't stop the morphing, so that eventually the standard becomes rather arbitrary. A good example is English spelling, which used to be quite logical back when it was standardized, but since then the pronunciations have changed (mostly simplified). The standardization allows us to read the Declaration of Independence and Shakespeare and even older stuff, but makes good spelling into a feat worthy of contests.
Some questions to ponder: How would one re-standardize English spelling? Whose pronunciation should be used? Who would enforce it? Who would translate all of the old writing into the new spelling? Would this cause English dialects to diverge even faster?
One last point about English: It has been criticized for having so many ways to say almost the same thing (i.e., loose grammar and huge vocabulary). That is not needless complexity; it is richness. Don't fret. The richness would disappear from "lingua franca English" just as it did with Classical Greek (compared to koine Greek, the "lingua franca Greek"). If English actually does triumph and become the lingua franca of the 21st century, ironically most of our 22nd century descendants won't be able to understand most of 20th century English. Of course embedded computers will automatically translate for them, but the nuances will be lost except to scholars.