>Well, yeah. English is also painful to learn. Most people don't
>think it about their native language; to native English speakers, it
>feels like the most natural thing in the world. But it's a wildly
>inconsistent language, and well on its way to having all meaning
>derived strictly from word placement, which is a headache to learn for
>speakers of languages where meaning is based more on inflection. (One
>of the things I like about German and Esperanto both is noun
>declension -- lets me play around with noun placement to alter
>emphasis without changing objective meaning, something I have to mess
>around with passive vs. active voice in English to do, but doing that
>in English has side effects I may not want. For instance, "_Min_ amas
>^si" in Esperanto is far more dynamic and succinct than anything
>English can produce.)

The reason English is so wildly inconsistent is because English will take
these "untranslatable" words and assimilate them. While the sublties and
connotations might be lost, the central meaning will remain, adding to the
vocabulary. This is why English has the largest vocabulary of any language.
Somthing like ~300k words as compared to ~100k words for an "average"
modern language, IIRC.

English, the Borg of languages.

Polychrome