English grammar, I learned, is quite unlike any other language in the world, and is ridiculously easy to master. As the article discusses, English has only one conjugation, it has no subjunctive mood, no second person singular (thee and thou), English nouns have no gender, and unlike some languages (I'm looking at you, French, German, and Greek), written and spoken forms of English are the same.
That doesn't mean, however, that English is easy for a non-native to learn. But what makes it hard to learn is probably also its greatest advantage:
English abounds in synonyms, each with its own slightly different nuance or meaning. That’s why the thesaurus and the dictionary of synonyms are standard reference works in English but seldom found in other languages. Learning the subtle differences in meaning and tone between, say, “penniless,” “broke,” and “impecunious,” is, to put it mildly, a chore for foreigners.
The advantage of the huge vocabulary of English, of course, is that it makes English a superb literary and scientific language, able to express fine and precise shades of meaning far more easily than other tongues. This is no small part of the reason English has become the near universal language of science. It also makes English more efficient. The English version of a lengthy text is always substantially shorter than versions in other languages.
I checked Wikipedia for some stats on number of words and learned that in December 2010 a joint Harvard/Google study analyzing 5,195,769 digitised books found that English contains 1,022,000 words and that it is expanding at the rate of 8,500 words per year (or about one new word every hour!). Comparing the number of English words to other languages, however, is a difficult if not semantically impossible task because what is meant by a given language and what counts as a word do not have simple definitions.
Vocabulary matters because the more words you know, the better able you will be to communicate experiences to others and to yourself. Linguistic vocabulary is synonymous with thinking vocabulary, so the more words you know, the deeper your understanding of the world around you.
Praise economic forces, then, that English is winning:
English dominates the Internet. It is the only language used in air traffic control. It is the overwhelmingly dominant language of science. (Even the premier French scientific organization, the Institut Pasteur, publishes its papers in English first and only later in French). Sixty percent of all students studying a foreign language today are studying English. It’s a required course in school, starting early on, in an increasing number of countries.
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Other lingual interestingness:
1. Different languages are spoken at varying speeds but thanks to correlated differences in data-density, the same amount of information is conveyed within a given time period (TIME via Kottke):
For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable is, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second -- and the slower the speech thus was. English, with a high information density of .91, is spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, rips along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edges past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.
2. While both English and American accents have changed over time, it’s actually British accents that have changed more drastically since the colonial days. Early Brits, then, sounded more like modern Americans than vice versa. (Nick Patrick via Harrison)
