>On the other hand, English is a highly expressive language that
>conveys ideas well.

...Not really. There's some things that it's very good at, mostly wordplay and puns thanks to an immense vocabulary and lots of homophones. It's also just about the most musical Germanic language I'm familiar with. But there are languages that are far easier to learn, languages that are far less ambiguous in day-to-day matters, and languages that are more expressive in prose. Benjamin Sapir-Whorf (as in the Whorf hypothesis) found Hopi a language extremely well-suited to describing the world that physics and math and other hard sciences describe, far moreso than English. (He said something along the lines of Hopi being a rapier and English being a bludgeon.)

In other words, English is ambiguous, difficult to learn (particularly written English), and a poor choice for an International language. It's gained its prominence in the world stage mostly because of the economic power of the States and the extent of the British Empire, sort of like how French became the international language before that. (At least French is relatively easy to learn.) Japanese is judged to be about as difficult to learn as English, for much the same reasons, and many linguists consider Basque to be the most difficult language in the world to learn.

At the other end of the scale, there's Esperanto, which, though an artificial language, is stupidly, ridiculously easy to learn, and amazingly expressive (although it does have a tendency to generate rather immense words due to the tendency to make words by compounding them; it's not as bad an offender as German, but malsanule^jo -- hospital -- ain't elegant). I'm enough of an Esperantist to want it to become the true international language and everyone's second language (and the language thought of as "Terran" if we make contact with an alien species -- it's certainly far better suited to that than English), but enough of a realist to know that it's unlikely to happen.

-- Sean --
off-and-on amateur linguist
http://www.thebrokenlink.org The Broken Link 4.0 is live!
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