[hiAndrewQuinn]

Not from an aesthetic sense. I think it's really cool that we have a lot of languages. I'm personally willing to pay a high price in inconvenience to keep that coolness around, although not everyone would.

However I also don't think we will have to. Machine translation and language learning are substitute goods -- the better the former gets, the fewer people who will feel any desire to pursue the latter, because it just won't be that big of a deal to translate between X and Y anyway.

A universal second language for commerce is a fine middle ground, though.

[snordgren]

Given recent developments in AI, building a true Babelfish is more of a hardware challenge than a software challenge these days.