🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <10182@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil> matt@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil (Matt Rosenblatt) writes:
>English wound up with an easy-to-speak, easy-to-understand 
>isolated SVO structure.  That's one of its special virtues.

Easy-to-understand? This would rather stand for a language just the opposite,
with lots of marks for Object, Subject and redondancies in the Verb and
everywhere, so that things are clear and unambiguous. I saw many examples
of native Hungarian misunderstanding a complex sentence because of the lack
of Object marks and the omission of the relative "that"/"which"

>In fact, we've got more words than any other language, period.
>That's another of the special virtues that English has.  

A word is the thing between two spaces, right? So for two languages
with really different grammatical structures, a word in one language
is often several words in the other one and vice-versa. So the number
of words is surely not the number of different ideas as people may
naively think, the number and the complexity of ideas that can be
conveyed does not depend on the language but on the man.

>[...] Britain was multi-cultural (in the 
>best, hierarchical sense of multi-culturalism, as in the British
>India of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen) long before the term "multi-
>culturalism" was coined.  That's yet another special virtue of English.

Is Britain still multi-cultural in its language? Not more than any other
language accepting lots of borrowings, for instance English terminology
in French.

-- Olivier Clary