Spanish spelling is better, pronunciation is easier (no th, only 5 vowels, etc.), native speakers almost as numerable, allows you to understand Portuguese, Italian, etc.

It wasn't chosen, America just won

Spanish orthography is pretty regular, but then you have 42 inflections per verb for three different patterns, and the most important verbs are of course highly irregular. Not to mention the fact that the difference between ser and estar isn't easy to learn. And there are a few more things that are hard (limiting to pronunciation: the guttural j/g, and the rr; counting syllables is a recurring question in quizzes).

> It wasn't chosen, America just won

That doesn't make English a bad language. Perhaps America (I guess you're referring to the USA) won because of English is so easy.

But cultural, financial and political influence obviously count.

Before English, French was the international language of diplomacy, and it was very influental in science and humanities. Spoken French is as simple as Spanish at a glance. The writing system is peculiar, but still much more regular than the English one.

I think an appealing thing about English is the ridiculous vocabulary. When it doesn’t have a word, it just steals one from another language. We have a French-based word that’s a “fancy” way to say an English-based synonym from the court vs common language situation with the Normans. Then borrowed liberally from Greek and Latin during the enlightenment, and every other language when colonialism kicked in (including a lot of botched Spanish). That constant borrowing is partly why our spelling is insane.

Oh and add to the insanity that we’ll borrow the same French word twice, frozen in each time.

It’s fascinating to see the language evolve through eg India. It’s a secondary language that fills a gap to provide a commonly understood language in a region with massive linguistic diversity. But then it’s developed it’s own regionalisms that are bleeding back into regions where it is the primary language.

It’s kind of like shell scripting to me. It started simple, got random useful things tacked on over time. You can’t formally define it, but it’s pragmatically powerful. And there aren’t real rules despite people trying so hard over the years, just conventions that shift and change. And often the “rule makers” just make things more complicated in the end with only some of it sticking.

I highly recommend the English History Podcast for anyone interested.

There's also the budding euro-English, which is kinda funny because it is to some extent the revenge of all the words we've stolen from other European languages and then slowly turned into false-friends.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English#Vocabulary

Anyway as an American I'm always in favor of just giving our language away to anyone to do whatever they want with it, really just go nuts, especially -- throw some z's in there, they really add some pizzazz to the language. (Just ignore the British, they will try to get you to change them back to s's... but you can see what that does to the pizzazz!).

Totally agree. I love that it’s the gumbo of languages. Throw whatever you want in there. I’m down.

And as an American I reject the British pronunciation of “herb” and “lieutenant.”

Every language steals words from other languages. Heck, eastern Asian languages have stolen an entire script from English (pinyin).

There’s nothing unique about English in this regard.

The stealing isn’t unique for sure. But most of the vocabulary in our language is borrowed words. Mostly just the “sight words” kids learn in early school is what remains of Old English. And many English words are the rougher equivalent of a borrowed, nicer words.

Most languages were pretty calcified by Old or Middle English, and English doesn’t seem to be letting up. But no language is static.

But with tech and mass communication, English is squeezing into many languages.

Pinyin is kind of weird. It’s not borrowing concepts, but lending itself to translation in and out. Based off prior western attempts and observation of Japanese success. Typesetting is more practical, and then computers really push it… the latter I feel awkward about. 1/2 is the typesetting benefit, 1/2 is eurocentrism. I dunno. Maybe I’m overthinking.

The vocabulary is more interesting to me because it’s importing ideas or nuances around ideas. It’s primarily nouns, though.

Learning other languages is great to see the world differently. Even in just French, which is fairly close: eg faire doesn’t have a real English equivalent, but makes total sense. It’s like how I learn programming languages I’ll never use for work, just to see things from their perspective.

I don’t know enough about Asian languages. Working on fleshing out my history knowledge now from Asian perspectives vs what I got in school. Maybe one day I’ll be brave enough to address a language.

Spanish has its own obstacles. Like all the conjugations and the subjunctive. Or how verbose it is.

Meanwhile compare it to English tense grammar like I did run, I do run, I will run.

I don’t think technical language comparisons are all that enlightening about which one is “best”.

I have been running, I had been running, I will have had run, I would have had been running

English has a large amount of tenses as well, and if I were you I wouldn't discount the English subjunctive either

"I will have had run" and "I would have had been running" are not sensible. Perfect tenses indicate completion. If you try to "stack" two copies the auxiliary verb "have" to make some kind of double-perfect tense, it doesn't make any sense--it makes no more sense than saying "I wented to the store" or "I ated the food." There are reasons you can have utterances like "had had" in English, but it typically involves the other meaning of the word "have" (the non-auxiliary meaning), like "I had had steak, and James had had lasagna, but we both were still hungry."

Subjunctive may be interesting to analyze, but it's not an additional form of the word.

By my count, English has 12 tenses. You cannot just invent new ones, because people won't be able to understand you. They are fairly regular: present, past, and future, which can be modified by making them perfect, continuous, or both.

"By next month I will have had run 50 km" - is there a BETTER way to say this sentence? It refers to the past from the prism of next month, but also RELATES it to that point in time

"If I had continued boxing professionally, I would have been running 50 km a week" Here's it's a conditional, I think I stuck an extra had in there by accident.

By my English textbook there's 16 tenses, 4x4

Past, present, future, future-in-the-past (would) x Simple, continuous, perfect, continuous-perfect (have been V-ing)

Point being, English grammar is far from simple, as this conversation clearly demonstrated

> "By next month I will have had run 50 km" - is there a BETTER way to say this sentence?

By next month, I will have run 50km. This means that "I run 50km" completes first, and then next month arrives afterwards.

> By my English textbook there's 16 tenses, 4x4

Depends on how you count tenses. Different textbooks will give different counts, depending on what is considered a "tense". Which is not a reflection of the complexity of English, but a reflection of how hard it is to come up with definitions for terms in linguistics. "Would" is often not counted as a tense, but it may be counted as a tense, particularly if you are explaining English to speakers of a language which have a tense expressing something similar.

> Point being, English grammar is far from simple, as this conversation clearly demonstrated

Most languages are far from simple, I don't think English deserves special attention.

Spanish has a similar amount of tenses, some expressed in inflections, others through auxiliary verbs. Spanish doesn't have the obsession with the gerund ("I go home" is fine), but has (im)perfect past, plusquam perfect, and future tenses, combinations (no habría pensado: wouldn't have thought) and conditionals in all, just like English. They just don't correspond 1-1.

The subjunctive in English is a bit of joke in comparison to the Spanish one.

I'm not saying English has no nuance beyond my example.

But this relatively simple grammar is English's strength. Consider how you translate your examples into other languages, especially the future hypotheticals that aren't a trivial concept to communicate period yet the rules for producing them are still simple in English.

Spanish (at least some European variants) definitely has the "th-sounds" though. But similarly to English, it's not terribly important to get them right. The variants spoken in South America use sibilants instead.

Oh yeah, I studied Latin American Spanish so I did forget that Spaniards do have these sounds. But the vowel number is clearly smaller. The hardest sound is probably the "rr" rolling r

In English it's probably distinguishing between a number of vowels like BAD/BED or PULL/POOL, and words like STRENGTH that really test the limits of Mandarin speakers

English has inconsistent spelling and pronunciation because it is a pigeon language, a mix of various Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Celtic, Dutch, and Norman French, then later with a lot of Latin and Greek words added.

The grammar is simpler (no gender and fewer inflections), but it has more phonemes than most other Indo-European languages, and has one of the largest vocabularies.

The word you're looking for is "pidgin" language, not "pigeon," but no, English is not a pidgin language. An example of a pidgin language is something like Tok Pisin. Pidgin languages essentially start out life as a not-quite-language, with such restricted vocabulary and grammar that there are concepts that can't be uttered, and such languages tend to grow back a grammar on top of that as they develop into a full, proper language.

English is not a pidgin language because the grammar is very clearly identifiable as a Germanic language (albeit a clearly simplified form), but with substantial lexical borrowings from other languages. Grammatical simplification and lexical borrowing is not particularly unusual in language development--in fact, English may not even be the biggest offender in these departments (I believe Turkic languages borrowed more from Mongolian languages than English has from Romance languages).

I'm curious, given the proximity of England to the Celtic world, why did English not borrow more from Gaelic? Hopefully it's not a stupid question, I realize that the language probably largely developed in Saxony, but I don't know much about how it made its way to the British isles.

There is a lot that is not clear about the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain. The obvious archaeological evidence suggests a very abrupt shock that sees Roman Britain almost completely replaced by Anglo-Saxon migration in maybe a generation or two. This has traditionally been interpreted as effectively a complete population replacement, although this has been challenged in more recent archaeology.

Probably, I would say, the big reason for the lack of Celtic borrowings into English is the fact that, to whatever degree there was admixture between Celtic and Anglo-Saxon populations, English would have been the prestige language, and the prestige language tends to be little affected by borrowings compared to the non-prestige language. You see this with French borrowings: French was the prestige language of England for about 400 years or so, so English starts borrowing all sorts of things from French, but not vice versa. The existence of the Danelaw region--a part of England that was primarily Danish rather than English even when largely ruled by the English--provided a substantial contact region for Old English/Old Norse borrowing, which was helped by the very similar nature of the two languages.

Super interesting thanks, I'll have to read up on the Danelaw, first time I've heard of that!

If I’m not mistaken the latest research on this topic incorporates the results of DNA studies that seem to suggest there was indeed a population replacement (made possible in part by the very large number of the Anglo-Saxon immigrants and the very much reduced, as a result of the upheavals after the departure of the Romans, number of Britons).

The linguistic evidence has always suggested complete replacement. Even with the prestige language of invaders taking over you would expect some geographical names, especially for small, insignificant and / or out of the way features to persist and yet in England there is pretty much not a single place name that has Celtic origins (outside of Cornwall of course)

There are a few placenames of Celtic origin, for example, Kilburn.

The success of English is not the result of a “worse is better” situation. It’s the result of the fact that the English colonialists much of the world and then after colonialism ended and the world became more global through trade and communications, the biggest economy in the world with the biggest media industry in the history of the world spoke English.