🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <10182@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil>, matt@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil (Matt Rosenblatt)
says:
>
>In article <C0Hr0w.159@NeoSoft.com> claird@NeoSoft.com (Cameron Laird) writes:
>
>English wound up with an easy-to-speak, easy-to-understand
>isolated SVO structure.  That's one of its special virtues.

Easy to speak and understand for those who are used to it, just
like any other structure. That's not a very special virtue.

>And thanks to all those French- and Latin-type Romance words,
>an Englishman often has two or three ways to say something that
>a German, Dutchman, or Afrikaner on the one hand or a Mexican,
>Brazilian or Frenchman on the other hand may have only one way
>to say.  We've got more words than any other Germanic language.
>We've got more words than any other Indo-European language.
>In fact, we've got more words than any other language, period.
>That's another of the special virtues that English has.

From an outsider's point of view, that is a clear disadvantage.
English has many synonyms (-> more words to learn without gaining
expressiveness) and, much worse, many almost-synonyms. The correct
use of these words follows no clear pattern and is a nightmare
for anyone who wants to learn English more than superficially.

>All those words from both the Germanic "ice people" and the Romance
>"sun people" demonstrate that 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.

If this is a virtue at all, then one of the situation centuries back,
and not of any language. Just because this language was used
long ago in a multicultural environment it needn't be ideal for
today's multicultural environments.

>With all its special virtues, it's no wonder that foreigners all
>over the globe are learning English to a far greater extent than
>French, Arabic, German, Italian or Japanese.

The reasons for that have almost nothing to do with inherent virtues
of the English language. The reason is simply that English is the
language of countries with large economic and political influence.
This could change within a short time, and English could become
quite unimportant again.

Konrad Hinsen (hac041@zam001.zam.kfa-juelich.de)