> I have no means of predicting the political state of the world in another couple of centuries. Do you?

We can look at futurists who claim they do. We can look at big trends that have occurred since the Big Bang. And the "futurists" all say we are "globalizing" and becoming more "interconnected". Transforming from provincal economies and governments to world governments and super-national economic trading blocks. And that everyone in the world is learning English. All the world's elites speak English. And the other member's of their community, when they see that the elites know English, force their children to learn English because they want them to grow up to be like the current elite. In Indonesia, there is currently growing concern that their local language is dying off as parents overencourage their kids to learn English from a young age.

> You're forgetting prosody and gestures

Which are also not present when written down. Natural language has to have a verbose enough in syntax to be compressed to the intersection of bandwidth features present in both Oral and Written. Without suffering too high of information loss. In other words yes prosody and gestures are important, by they are supplementary to the core feature set. The syntax also has to be verbose enough to not loose too much information when transferred back and forth between paper and speech. This is not an important requirement for programming, which can exploit its single medium more extensively.

> The differences between spoken languages are vast.

The differences in brain anatomy between those speaking different languages is not. [ A function could contain infinitely many points. Yet it is possible for all these points to all have exactly the same derivative. And once you have modeled the derivative, you have a certain degree of predictive confidence in all future positions of the function. LISP is similar to an underlying derivative of a function generating programming languages, while still being usable as a language itself. ]

>and voilá, you've got your NL parser.

>computer systems comprehending natural language were just a stone's throw away

I completely agree is it nearly impossible to write an authoritative model of processing system of the brain from top-down conjecture. Because semantic association is defined by its relation to other chunks, we will NEVER have a perfect database of these relations, unless we map the human brain. That's why we have computational neuroscience, and are simulating cortical columns on neuron emulators, which will be able to map long before we would armchair philosophize it due to the complexity. I assure you I can very skeptical\pessimistic of "intelligent design".

I think what we can agree on in relation to the OP is that when he says LISP is the last language he'll ever learn it's kind of cheating the question he imposes on himself because it's flexible enough tool to morph into any language depending on the problem domain. And a specie's flexibility and capacity for adaptation is the best measure of survivability.

[ please hit me up via email if you want to drop links to journal articles so I'm not as ignorant to your field of research ]

[ Also please check out this article: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jz3FEk2KJ... "Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan" . English by evolutionarily choosing alphabet over characters has proven more adaptable and survivable ]