I think while English is really tough to speak perfectly, it's pretty easy to muddle through. "It suhrengz is" that you can drop all inflections, butcher pronunciations, and ignore the chaotic spelling, and still be able to communicate pretty reliably.
Getting English right is a fractal of traditions and exceptions, but its MVP is very forgiving.
Re:Blue–Green Distinction in Language
by henrikschroder on Thursday January 23, 2020 @09:28PM
(#22134838)
> but its MVP is very forgiving.
Yes, that was exactly my original point, thanks for explaining it more hacker-news-y than me. :-)
Compared to Indo-European languages. Look at other language families, and our insistence on articles, inflection for tenses, plurality, and case (in the case of pronouns) looks unnecessarily complicated.
And then there is the insane polysemy of English words. "get" has a wide variety of meanings, some of which are completely opposite from one another!
> When it comes to speaking simple English
I should also point out that English has relatively complex phonotactics. A word like "strengths" is excruciating for anyone whose phonology doesn't have consonant clusters in the first place.