🚀 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.

Yes, in the mind of a native speaker.  Not elsewhere, I'm afraid.

>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.

Or he may not.  He may turn out to have more ways to say it than the
Englishman.  Borrowing is not the only way to develop a wealth of
synonyms, and I would suggest that some languages which have been
developing their lexicons by domestic means (derivation), such as
Georgian, Armenian or Arabic, are characterised by even richer
synonymy than English.  Besides, synonymy is not all that there is to
having a lot of ways to say something.  The fixed word order of
English reduces the number of ways significantly.

In any case, let's test this.  Give an example of something that can
be said in three ways in English, but in only one way in German.  I'll
see if I can come up with nine ways to say it in Russian.

Not to mention the fact that other languages have been doing a lot of
borrowing as well.  Turkish and Hindi, for instance, are chock full of
Persian and Arabic words.

>We've got more words than any other Germanic language.

This statement wants a proof.

>We've got more words than any other Indo-European language.

So does this one.

>In fact, we've got more words than any other language, period.

Make that a comma, or a semicolon at best.  Who is keeping the score?

>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.

No, it isn't.  Except that in the overwhelming majority of cases they
couldn't care less for those "virtues" of its.  What makes them learn
English rather than something else is that there is so much of it around.
Which has nothing to do with the simplicity of its syntax or the size
of its lexicon.

-- 
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Ivan A Derzhanski  (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk; iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)    Gospel)
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