English is over rated

[lightcrystal]

...I don't think that English has become one of the dominant languages [not most dominant, last time I looked more people speak Hindi and maybe Mandarin Chinese] because English is "better" than other languages.

Hi LightCrystal.

The most common comment I hear is that "English is difficult to learn", followed by a litany of spelling abnormalities, but the blame for these abnormalities can all be laid at the feet of the rapacious mercenary Caxton who, in the second half of the fifteenth century, was casting about for the most rewarding market (doh: London!) and carved the phonetic spelling of that city in stone.
We humans change the language by speech (I worry about what today's teenagers make of a novel that reads "We went to Grandma's for Christmas and had a gay old time") but the read/written form is fixed for all time. As our speech form changed, our written form has not.

I counter this comment with verbs. Walk into any bookshop and take a look at "501 verbs in Spanish" or "501 French verbs". There you have a 700-page book with conjugations for verbs on each page: the Present Indicative, the Past, the Future, the subjunctive, the pluperfect and for all I know the past pluperfect subjunctive(grin). You will never find a book "501 verbs in English". Why?

For one thing, English has no future tense for verbs! "Yesterday I sat; Today I sit; Tomorrow I ???". "Yesterday I ate; Today I eat; Tomorrow I ???".
Once we have mastered the past and present tense of an English verb, that's it!
You can use a modifier such as will/would, can/could, shall/should and of course the auxiliary verbs have/had etc. and at that you are pretty well done!
With "sit" and "sits" you have it all.
With "eat" and "eats" you have it all.
There is no need for "501 verbs in English".

I agree that the UK/USA dominance is a large influencer, but consider how many European firms (the Dutch firm Phillips was one) choose English as their business language rather than, say, Dutch or French.

Cheers
Chris

I can see "could of" and "should of" becoming standard English. It was red ink through the essay material in my School era. But now so many people say it. By the The Curiosity Show that I mentioned earlier was a science show on Australian TV in the 80's. It was made in Adelaide by two presenters Rob Morrison and Deane Hutton. I met Deane Hutton once when he came to Melbourne and at The Royal Melbourne Show dipped a rubber ball into dry ice. Then he dropped the ball and it shattered. Weirdly The Curiosity Show was exported into other countries. You can watch the German intro on YouTube!

[lurcherlover]

As a native speaker of English I feel limited by English.

One, sometimes English does not have the grammar needed for some expressions. At best it is awkward. I learnt Mandarin Chinese at high school. The teacher [not a native Chinese person] had to explain the state of being fashionable in English by saying tongue in cheek it's "fashionabilicality". I find it as well. I have to make up things. The novel is "academicy" in its college setting.

Two, English has a terrible absence of esoteric words or psychological state words. For instance I have a need to be nowhere near alcohol. If you put any bottle of alcohol in my home I will take it, go outside and empty it. Not a moral thing in any way. Rather, something that I do without thinking. Alcohol phobia? No word for that in any way. Whereas Russian has some words for mental or spiritual states that English does not; there's a Russian word for a feeling of existential nothingness while looking out a window.

I would even go as far as to say that English handicaps my ability to understand the world and people. I don't think that English has become one of the dominant languages [not most dominant, last time I looked more people speak Hindi and maybe Mandarin Chinese] because English is "better" than other languages.

Well, Shakespeare did not feel limited. The UK is the home of the greatest playwright and poet of all time. Shakespeare's English is wonderful. Have you read any of the plays, or read the Sonnets?
Well, I'm biased, but give me WS any day over any other, and the English language, in my opinion, is very fine. I of course love Italian, and I feel that Russian is pretty special too. But I'm not going to do English down, and on LV there is a lot of English, even if it has other flavours.

[ChrisGreaves]

... people who are at least bilingual when I am not )

Anne, it depends on a definition for "bi-lingual"; as does the term "fluency".

When people as me if I am fluent in French, Spanish, Italian, or German, I generally respond with a question "For how long?"

To almost everyone in this remote town of 3,800 people I am fluent in all four languages, since practically no-one else here speaks French, Spanish, Italian, or German. I have two phrases in Slovene: "I do not speak Slovene very well", and "I do not comprehend Slovene very well". So I can blow the socks off people here with five foreign languages!
In the Île de France I have been thought of as a Parisien in 2016, 2014, and as far back as 1980, but after three minutes I stumble and then "Ahah! Where are you from?". I would say that I am fluent in French to the measure of three minutes. I can rattle on in French for hours, but three minutes is my limit to go undetected. I fool most people because I learn to speak a language musically. I can record the lilt, the melody, the tones and emphasis that comes from listening and emitting as if I were a cassette recorder.

To this extent I would say that every regular speaker of English is tri-lingual. A party-trick is to tell someone "I can teach you three hundred words in French (Spanish) in ten seconds, complete with the gender, and a guarantee that you will remember everyone of them, gender included, for the rest of your life".

Stunned amazement!

Then I point out that (almost) every English word that ends in "tion" is the same in French (Spanish) and is feminine.
Of course; Latinate languages.

An argument that is relevant to LibriVox is that no matter how awkward we might feel our accent is (or that our lexicon is limited to 300 words!), our host is fluent in the language and can accommodate most variations. I have proved this time and time again on trips around Europe.
In the Bach project, my German pronunciation is riddled with errors, but every German phrase is accompanied by enough German words, and in some cases, numeric identifiers of music, to allow the serious student of Bach to locate the reference material.
In Denia in 1977 I managed to get directions to the bus depot by asking a local "¿La staçion, por favor?". There being no railway within about 50Km of Denia, the local figured I was a tourist (clothing), a foreigner ("la Staçion" rather than "L'estaçion"), and that I just wanted to get home. He pointed to a bus in the distance and that did the trick for me. Perfect communication in both directions!

Cheers
Chris

[paullawleyjones]

Alcohol phobia? No word for that in any way.

Methyphobia, or Potophobia.

[paullawleyjones]

As a native speaker of English I feel limited by English.
...
I would even go as far as to say that English handicaps my ability to understand the world and people.

As a native English speaker, I don't. Are you sure this isn't a limitation of your vocabulary, rather than of the language itself?

One, sometimes English does not have the grammar needed for some expressions.
...
Two, English has a terrible absence of esoteric words or psychological state words.

This is why we have loanwords.

I don't think that English has become one of the dominant languages [not most dominant, last time I looked more people speak Hindi and maybe Mandarin Chinese] because English is "better" than other languages.

This depends on how you define 'dominant.' No, English isn't the most widely natively-spoken language or first language (L1 in ESL/EFL jargon,) but it does 'dominate' as the lingua franca in business, science, and technology, and for this reason, enough people speak it as a second language (L2) globally for it to be considered the most dominant language.

[ChrisGreaves]

Methyphobia, ...

Mr Crosby, in High school Chemistry class, warned us against drinking methyl alcohol, because it brings on "blindness, madness, and death". So "morbid" is spot-on!
Crosby did not, to the best of my memory, warn us against ethyl alcohol!
Cheers, Chris

[ChrisGreaves]

As a native speaker of English I feel limited by English.

I recommend (endorse?) and subscribe to two podcasts:-
"The History of English Podcast"
and
"Words for granted"
Chris

[paullawleyjones]

I recommend (endorse?) and subscribe to two podcasts:-
"The History of English Podcast"

Seconded.

[Gvbriel]

English is the best language

[Gvbriel]

mandarin is the hardest language to me