"Maybe his next article will be about how airlines should speak Esperanto because English is such a flawed language. That’s a clever and unique observation."
Esperanto is a superior language to English. And English has many flaws.
Theoretically it would be better to have all pilots and airports learn an efficient language.
But it would be stupid and immature to seriously write a blog post about that, especially without talking about all the flaws in that plan.
Not really. You can say it's more regular but that's because it sees barely any actual use; if it ever gained popularity it wouldn't stay regular. (And given that pilots speak in set phrases anyway, irregularity isn't really an issue). It's not a great language by any stretch, it's an awkward mismash of four european languages; sure it sounds kind of nice in an Italianate way, but if that's what you want then why not just speak Italian?
English really is a disaster of a language. There was a(nother) great XKCD about it just a few days ago. https://xkcd.com/2907/
Sometimes lack of rigidity is actually an feature that allows for things to sort of work that would be politically impossible if thinks had to be specified formally before being used.
There is no way it can work.
People don't care about governing bodies when they speak a language.
Ie, the governing body decrees that the regionalisms from the dominant region is the definitive version of the language. But it might be considered cool to speak that way even without a governing body.
Maybe it's a totally different language but still it goes to show that even a very prestigious central authority doesn't make a language better or less prone to diverge. Regardless of the reason, French is evolving much more quickly than English.
The point of esperonto was to make it easier to learn. French is regular, but extremely complicated. English is complicated and has a million special cases. Both languages are hard enough to master that society starts to judge a person's intelligence by how well they know the rules and special cases.
This. Utility and purity always pull in opposite directions.
I see those boutique little (programming) languages written by amateur language designers with exotic type systems or “everything is an X” philosophies, and my reaction is to assume that they are useless for anything past toys and experiments.
I know useful language features have been born in that world and then eventually bolted onto mutt languages like Java and Python, but that suits me just fine.
At least one one perspective, English is superior. That perspective is that you can actually use it in almost any modern situation because it has been tried and tested globally.
English:Esperanto::csv:parquet
(Although I think parquet is much more useful than Esperanto and may eventually end up dethroning csv)