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Comment by mamon | Hacker News Reader

English has additional advantage of being painfully simple logical, grammar-wise. There's only a handfull of grammar rules to learn, and they are pretty consistent, exceptions are quite rare. This helps to write clear and concise text, unlike languages like, say, Polish, which evolved when Poland was under foreign rule for over a century, and for that reason it is deliberately cryptic and ambigous :)

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> exceptions are quite rare

... are you sure we speak the same language?

English has less exception than say French but far more than Esperanto. It is a question of reference frame.

Yeah but two of the languages with exceptions are in active use by millions or even billions, while the cohesive one is used by a sum total of... A few dozen? Should Esperanto enter any active usage, however unlikely that is, the exceptions will come.

BTW, Esperanto has a few _hundred_ native speakers and tens or hundreds of thousands of speakers. I agree that it's not comparable to a natural language, but there are many, many natural language communities that are much smaller.

English painfully simple, grammar wise? Wait until you tried constructed language like Esperanto or Ido.

Eh the hard parts of English arise because it likes to mug languages in dark alleys and pick their pockets for spare grammar and vocabulary.

This makes it difficult to form a unified theory of the language. The more elegant your rules, the more exceptions there are.

But it’s also a super power. It makes the language feel more familiar to just about anyone who speaks an Indo-European language. There’s something homely and welcoming in english for anyone.

And the readiness with which english adopts foreign vocabulary when practical is simply inspiring. You can introduce basically any word from any language and make it stick.

And then there’s Slavic languages where at least in mine, every verb or pronoun can come in one of 20 or so different forms. Nouns have 20+ different forms too.

Not expecting Slovenian to become lingua franca of anything any time soon. It’s just too hard.

I can't speak from any experience outside Romance languages, but English verb conjugation is significantly simpler, along with a lack of gendering of nouns. Those two points alone go a long way.

Mandarin the spoken language has quite simple grammar and is pretty easy to learn as languages go.

The written form is painful though.

I was amazed to learn that even native Chinese readers forget the written language if they don't use it for a few years.

The one major thing English has going for it is that native English speakers are pretty tolerant of non-native speakers getting the grammar wrong. With just a little effort you can get people to understand you which is not the case for many languages.

I would say that instead of logical, it is instead familiar and flexible/redundant. You can use essentially whatever structure you like - it may be incorrect, but you have to mess up fairly significantly for English to be unintelligible.

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