It has on occasions been said that 'a bilingual is a person having equal difficulty with two languages'.

Since my own suite of such problems extends to several acquired languages and major groups (IE, Chinese, Japanese), I have a great sympathy for those seeking to visit new lands.

A two week visit into an unknown speech community is basically a challenging proposition (for me, first trips to Pakistan, Korea and Thailand -- all 'buffered' by a business agenda that starts with a generally soon to disappear 'introducing party' --- come to mind).

Without advanced warning, entering a new speech community can be quite off-putting; being armed with grammars, dictionaries, phrase books and the like may help, but there are no guarantees there; my first trip to Beijing (to deliver a paper on data entry methods to the Society for Chinese Information Processing) was nothing more than an exercise in stage fright (I ended up delivering the paper in English, and then speaking quite freely in Mandarin after the meeting was over).

All of this to say that assimilados should all try their hardest when seeking to live and work in a new community, and that the use of any and all resources to ease that stress is well recommended.

On the other hand, I see little logical linkage between a discussion on the need to develop personal skills in the language of use in a community to be visited and any assertion that English is somehow deprecated as a global language.

The reference to the many borrowings our lexicon contains seems particularly misplaced; to the extent a given language might be 'universal' in a world where 'language death' is a practical fact, the preservationist desire would be to increase borrowings for the limited diversity they do bring.

To the extent the students are from the communities of origin, I would think that borrowings are very much the stuff of ESL in building associations from the known to the novel.

As to the irregularities of our spelling system, etc., -- oh well; it may be accident of history or some other process that allowed our last major sound change to coincide with the printing press -- this medium suggest very strongly that technology again will chage how people transcribe their ideas and experiences.

But to the point at hand -- what other candidates are on the horizon for a useable global language? In the same way that I chose to learn Mandarin because more people speak it than any other language, English must be a primary choice because of its broad distribution.

Is it merely locale that makes English the language of choice in my (technology) workplace, or doesn't the fact that there are substantial populations of productive Arabic, Farsi, Tagalog, Russian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean speakers compel the selection of a common second (or later) language.

Moreover, were we to attempt to bring a specifically constructed language into use by fiat, we could at best hope for a form of diglossia (e.g. the use of koine in all Greek documents during the reign of the Generals).

There aren't that many examples of top-down language formation in recent history: Israel as a new country brought a theological language into productive use in about a generation (but they had to 'borrow' swear words -- other than those occurring in the bible -- from their semitic cousins the Palastinians), and of course it took a revolution in China for the introduction of "PUTONGHUA" (i.e. Mandarin) to occur.

Each of these reminds me of a quote from David Olmsted, "a language is a speech community that shares a common army." So the question becomes, 'short of at gunpoint, how does one introduce a global language?', with my answer tending toward letting market forces work.