Rebuild the English language from the bottom up?

English is a poor choice for a lingua franca.

Despite its relatively simple grammar, it has so many quirks and special cases that it must be fiendishly hard to learn for non-native speakers. Those of us who have tried to explain some of the rules (or exceptions) must be used to the confused stares and protests of 'that desn't make sense'. Because very often it doesn't. There's no logical reason, for example, to prefer 'I don't drive' to 'I drive not'.

It's clear that it's history, not common sense, that's led to English being the common language for so much of the world's population. And while the very things that make English a great choice for literature – the vast vocabulary, the flexibility and the potential for ambiguity all make it a wonderful language for storytelling – those same characteristics make it a terrible choice for law, commerce and mutual understanding among non-native speakers.

And it made me wonder. Given that attempts to create a new, common world language generally seem doomed to failure (Esperanto, anyone?), might we be better off giving English a proper clear-out? Do away with some of the more bizarre quirks. Simplify the rules. And the spelling for that matter – the idea that English is sometimes spelt phonetically and sometimes not must be very confusing, especially for speakers of languages that are not written phonetically, such as Chinese.

There would be enormous obstacles to any such venture, of course. Who would be in charge of it, for one thing? And there are, I understand, already non-native English speakers, especially in the Far East, who do use a slightly modified, simpler and more logical version of English for business. So perhaps more radical, wholesale, change is just not needed.

More to the point, though, language tends to be pretty democratic, and attempts to dictate widespread rule-changes from on high are often doomed to failure. And perhaps that's the way it should be. English has been influenced by vast numbers of people and has borrowed words and expressions from all over the world. It is not logical, and it is not straightforward. But then neither are people...