And yet we've complicated the language. You do know that "Bootylicious" is in the dictionary now, right? (as an informal adjective meaning sexually attractive)
In our language, "thee" used to be the common form of "you (singular)" and "thy" meant "your (singular.)"
When you think about it, we've "simplified it" yet have complicated it in terms of communication. If I say "You ate dinner with us" it could mean one person or it could mean a bunch of people.
Language like French and Italian have this distinguished even in their verbs! That's why it is so easy for someone who is French to use Italian. Do you truly think that English could become universally acceptable even though there are so many other more EFFICIENT languages out there in the ways of communication and CLARITY?
The only thing English has going for it is that it's in an industrialized part of the world. English means power. But it's not the most widely used language. Heck Chinese is being implemented into all the bank machines over here in Toronto. If anything, English might be fading!
When it comes to asian countries.. it's not so much that they're involved with themselves as it is that their SYNTAX is very different from other languages. Take Japanese, for example. The verb is always at the end of the sentence. Always distinguished. In English, you can say "had had had had" etc.. and it would technically make sense.. but what does that mean in terms of communication?
We can't simplify English. All we can do is find the appropriate wording to structure what we want to say properly so that we are not misinterpreted.
English conjugation and lexicon in general is ridiculous, stupid, and feels of a language that should have died out. A long time ago. But that's what makes English awesome~ and makes other languages so much easier to learn haha. The important thing in English grammar is not to remember the rules, but the exceptions, haha. English vocabulary is just pure experience.
Anyway, in my opinion, there are only two really hard languages to learn; English to learn fluently (because of the aforementioned massive number of exceptions and alternate meanings in spelling and vocabulary, the overt necessity of punctuation and terrible conjugation in verbs), whereas Traditional Chinese is the hardest to learn to write, because of the sheer number of (really hard to learn because it's trad and it's silly and actually almost dead like english should be) characters.
you know there's a real problem with a language when native speakers, born speaking that language, can't remember how to write/say/read something... and it happens often. particularly when compared to other languages, English really stands out as being noticeably terrible.
I initially overlooked these posts.
I would like to mention to everyone that English is such an overestimated language in terms of complexity. Yes, English often carries ambiguity to a greater degree than other languages, like Spanish, but that's just a reflection of how simplified it has become.
Firstly, "you" and "you (pl.)" is not an explanation of how hard the language would be to learn. In almost every Romantic language, 'you' (pl.) forms are almost always irregular and greatly ignored in teaching. The ambiguity in
"you" and "you (pl.)" is almost never evident anyway, if you spoke in proper context. In fact, most Romantic languages RELY on context in the first place. English only does so for clarity, but others use it for meaning. Either way, "you all" is a perfectly acceptable substitution for "you (pl.)," and "you (pl.)" is technically a colloquialism. Therefore, the technical plural 2nd person in English should be "you all," just like how we translate "vosotros," and "umeis."
English syntax is very simple. You can break down sentences very easily. The rules that apply serve to destroy ambiguity, whereas other languages are noted to not have ANY specific word order. In Greek, you can say "the house the beautiful" and it means "the house is beautiful." You can also say "the the beautiful" and depending on whether "the" is masculine, feminine, or neuter, it means a different thing. The reason why "I throw the baby out the window some food" sounds weird is because the prepositional phrase is out of place (it should read "I throw the baby some food out the window"). However, other languages can speak this very same sentence and you're supposed to interpret it the same way as English, only they can say "I out the window throw some food the baby" and you're STILL supposed to make sense of it.
On "had had had had," those words are obviously not meant to be spoken in a normal fashion, having more efficient means of saying what you mean. The sentence is the polar opposite of euphonic.
Regarding English "conjugation," the only words we really conjugate are "to be." If you think about Spanish, they have a much more sophisticated conjugation system, with present, present progressive, conditional, perfect, pluperfect, future, simple future, future perfect, imperfect, preterite, imperative, infinitive, subjunctive tenses with RULES (both IDIOMATIC and otherwise) for which tense to use. Our future tense is very easy, composed of "will ___" and our perfect tense is "has / had ____." English has a progressive tense so we can clarify between ongoing actions and present actions... And all you need to do to form participles is add -ed or -ing to the verb at hand. What English has two participles for, other languages often run four to six. Still, be grateful we don't still decline nouns and adjectives.
English superlatives are just a combination of "most" and an adjective, unlike other languages where you add a suffix to the end.
The English vocabulary is actually also very simple. Most of the words draw from Proto-Germanic and the other half from Romantic.
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tl;dr? English is easy compared to other languages.
