I guess everybody knows that it was the Elizabethans who screwed up English. Most "experts" believe that English was pretty phonetic until they came along and executed the great vowel shift. I have always advocated going back to the Chauserian phonetic pronunciation. It is too late to change the spelling. Once I tried to read a book aloud using Spanish vowel values. Amazingly enough it is easy to do and any English speaker could learn it in no time.

Is one language "better" than another? If so, how can we tell?

Surely a question of evolutionary anthropology. What works better? Which language gives its users an advantage in comprehending reality, and in communicating their comprehension to others.

There's more. We must consider how a language defines and expresses categories, such as number, tense, mood and voice and all the rest. How the language empowers its users to think about reality makes the difference. Time, causation, responsibility are understood differently by users of different languages, and some ways of understanding are more or less productive of wealth and power.

And how can we tell which language works better in these ways? One way is just to look at the box score--English is doing quite well, in that regard, being up there with Spanish, although not nearly as big in the number department as Chinese..

I would propose another measurement of success for languages: power. Let us count the number of aircraft carriers aboard which these languages are spoken. The score then? Well , looking at real aircraft carriers, true, CV's and CVN's, with fixed-wing capability, not puny helicopter and jump-jet affairs, we find that there are 11 such vessels.

The number upon which English, that is American English is the official language? Eleven.

In measuring what works, Hillaire Belloc, an English poet, put it best, "“Whatever happens we have got The Maxim Gun and they have not” , ..

Leo Gallagher did this in the 80's.

Comedian, Gallager used to do this routine before he'd start hammering watermelons.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=yDFQXxWIyvQ#t=193s