[Off-topic] azrienoch:
I believe in language almost religiously. I spent a third of my life studying it, scrutinizing it, creating it--and spent even longer using it--pushing its limitations, exploring how it works, because I want to know how to use it best. Language is how we organize, how we help each other. Or don't. And when we don't, it's often because we can't help each other, we don't have a mutually understood language, and without that, it's difficult to feel the empathy necessary to move us. If we're on this planet for any reason at all, I believe it's at least to help one another. And that puts language right at the heart of human purpose. Our languages are our culture, our laws, our education and information.

I came to a point where I felt like there was little left to explore. I had to create. And I dedicated my life to writing, to using what I'd learned, and use it best. Mark Twain is one of my favorites. He revolutionized how we write by glorifying the way that we actually talk. He loved the sound of local accents, and adored the charm of his own. His work is directly, though not fully, responsible for the shift in how the world treats education. It was only available to the upper classes, but when literature changed, so did where we thought education would benefit.

That's the power of language. That's what each and every language user can do, and does everyday. But there are problems, like I said. We often misunderstand, often intentionally. I'm writing this mostly in the hope that I can put a few thoughts in your head to play with, so I won't bother trying to change people's intentions. But the misunderstandings--what can we do about them?

I don't believe in a global language. I don't believe we should have one. I love language, not hate it, and I want to keep alive every possible means of telling a story. A global language encourages people to leave their regional languages behind. There are six thousand languages on this planet, and the five largest are spoken natively by 2 billion people. Twenty languages die every year. That means the last person to speak that language natively passes away. Many of those languages were never written down, never recorded. Our ancestors, the grandparents of your and my grandparents-plus-a-few, told each other--in languages we will never know, never see, never hear--how their day went. Think about that. New languages are born, we call them creole languages, in as little as twenty years--a single generation. Surprisingly fast, but not a rate that stops the downward trend. And yet, if we did stop it, we would halt all the progress we are making by growing global languages.

That's just one of many problems the world is facing with communication. It's not even the most pressing, just one of the most interesting. In Mark Twain's time, he invested in a machine called the automatic typesetter, which failed where the linotype succeeded, because a problem they faced was the labor it took to put out a newspaper on a daily basis. A funny little anecdote: Alexander Bell approached Mark Twain about investing in the telephone as Twain was investing in any nifty invention he thought would turn a profit. Twain apparently thought to himself, "Well, I'd have one, and my publisher would have one, and the newspaper--but where's the real market?" And turned down the opportunity to invest in the telephone.

That anecdote brings me to the thrust of my point. Yes, surprise, I have one. The telephone, it turns out, is the answer to a whole host of problems we've been banging our heads on tables about. Nobody would have reasonably guessed that in as little as five years ago. We have the tools to translate languages in almost real-time conversation. This will only improve. We communicate with thousands of people at once, almost no matter where we are or the time of day or how else we're multi-tasking. Not just with our voices, but with our text, and even our faces and our hands. Deaf people use phones. Think about that. Even people who refuse to socialize, who refuse to talk to other people, could easily find a reason to get a tablet or a smartphone.

I summarize the portal news on XDA TV each week. A lot of people wonder why I do that. They either don't think I fit or don't think it's what I should focus on. But in a world where the answer to so many problems I'm passionate about fixing is in my pocket, and the fact that whether or not those answers will come to fruition has a lot to do with what happens on this forum, I simply must be a part of it. I believe in xda-developers, in all of the reasons a person would come here, from developing to using, and I believe in the results of that process. You make our communication better, making our languages better. I'm writing this to thank you for those efforts, and for letting me tell people about them.

Jeff