Comment by PaulDavisThe1st
3 days ago
> but there isn't any reason English is natively superior, any more than French was 150 years ago, or Latin 600 years ago.
Actually, there is. English is relatively unique in its ability to incorporate loan words and features of other languages. This is in part due to its history as a merger of 10k French (thus, Latinate) words into an otherwise Germanic language. But it's also due to the unfortunate history of the British empire, followed by American hegemony, which spread English to many other cultures who freely adapted it.
Whether this is enough to justify a continuing status as "the international language" is obviously debatable. But English is different from almost all other human languages, not because it is better, but because it is just ... more
The ability of English to easily incorporate loanwords is because it has lost almost all word flexion from Old English, with very few exceptions, like the plural marker "-s".
Because most grammatical markers are isolated prepositions, there are no problems caused by phonetic mismatches with the words to which they are associated, like it happens in the languages where a borrowed noun must fit into a declension pattern, which can produce phonetically awkward words.
While among the European languages, for English it is indeed the easiest to borrow new words, one can easily construct an artificial language that would be even better than English from this point of view, and which would remedy various problems of English, like the necessity of knowing separately a written form and a spoken form for every word, or the existence of a lot of semantic ambiguities that do not exist in other languages, or various difficulties to express various nuances using the existing modal verbs, or the too verbose methods for expressing certain verbal tenses, moods and voices.
Thus English does not really have any technical advantages. Its moat is the inertia caused by its so widespread use in the present, which will prevent any other language to replace it, regardless of how much simpler and better that language would be.
> a lot of semantic ambiguities that do not exist in other languages,
This is actually another strength of English, not a weakness.
> one can easily construct an artificial language that would be even better than English from this point of view,
The history of artificial languages (Esperanto in particular) is not encouraging in this regard.
> Thus English does not really have any technical advantages.
I wasn't really trying to suggest a technical advantage, but rather a cultural one. English users, as a worldwide bloc, are really incredibly open to loan words, modified grammar, and even whole new vocabulary. All of this happens in other languages too, but the culture of english makes or allows it to happen much faster and much more broadly.