Quote:
Does anyone doubt that a change to a global language is inevitable?
Not only do I doubt it, I am confident that it's virtually certain
not to happen.
The basic problem is that not everyone wants to talk about the same things. I believe there is such a thing as a "best" language
given a particular field of discourse, but it's abundantly clear that different groups of people have different priorities for what's deserving of a short and easy word. A universal language would facilitate certain kinds of communication, and greatly frustrate others.
The same is just as true of computer programming languages. There's a reason to have platform-independent languages, so that we can run software on any computer we face ... but there is also a reason for more than one language (even more than one platform-independent language!) for different purposes: ease of writing vs ease of use vs raw speed vs whatever else.
Quote:
A phonetic alphabet is the nuts.
If you mean being able to tell how a word is pronounced by looking at it, I generally agree. If you're proposing re-spelling words to match how they sound... sorry but we don't all pronounce words the same way (or even agree on how many sounds there are in our languages.)
Quote:
Should be interesting if anyone can provide data of how many people were speaking 2+ languages 100 years ago and how many now.
I don't have any data handy. I expect the number has fallen dramatically. (And I would expect the number to continue falling as long as languages become more global.) The number who speak 3 or more has probably fallen even more dramatically.