In college I would go climbing frequently and one of the people I met along the way was a student from Italy that was here for her doctoral. On one trip we were talking about all the things we found beautiful and I made a comment about how much I loved the sound of the romance languages, and how they were so sing-songy to my ear. She then proceeded to talk at length about how she found English so much more interesting because it allowed for expression that just wasn't possible in Italian. Specifically, the nature of English being a pidgin that not only accepts creating new concepts on the fly but almost encourages it means that she can think about things in English that are actually difficult to formulate in her native Italian.

I've since heard interesting comparisons as well from native Mandarin speakers, where there is a certain formulaic piece missing in English that let's them form ideas easier. Interestingly in that case they would describe opposites too where there are certain groupings of ideas that they found easier to form in Mandarin that they had to invent words for in English to get across. But they could do so - invent those words.

I'm a native English speaker and only a third rate French and Spanish speaker, so I have to take this on faith for the most part, but it is interesting to hear that common view across origins.

Jorge Luis Borges would agree with you, as he articulates in this interview with fellow native Spanish speaker William F. Buckley (starts at about 17:15 in case the timestamp disappears)

https://youtu.be/bNxzQSheCkc?si=LK_ZyRpBQjTvx7Av&t=1035

English has more words than those " around 500,000 words, compared to German’s 135,000" due to to it being the result of a merger of various different languages (https://ititranslates.com/which-language-is-richest-in-words...) So there's more stuff if you are into that sort of thing.

Sources generally seen as authoritative (Duden, Wahrig etc.) estimate that the German everyday language has between 250,000 and 500,000 words (depending how you count), without counting technical terms.

I've always wondered: do speakers of other languages enjoy spelling bees and puzzles based on spelling and wordplay as much as English speakers do? It seems like spelling bees wouldn't be as interesting in a more phonetic language, for instance.

They don't exist.

A French kid can reasonably spell words they hear, even if there are a lot of unpronounced or apparently useless letters.

I've heard from a Chinese friend that the same is true for Mandarin. Apparently most written words have a "meaning" component and a "pronunciation" component (excepting the most common words, which are easy to learn by rote).

French orthography competitions are on a different level. Spelling of difficult words combined with grammar rule exceptions.

French spelling is sometimes described as "one-way": it's almost always possible to pronounce a written word correctly, but very difficult to spell a word you've only heard.

Those are "phono-semantic compounds" for anyone looking to do more reading up on them. The example that springs most readily to mind is "嗎" (in Pinyin "mǎ") which is a question particle you put at the end of sentences meaning, roughly, "is it not so?" The left character is "口" meaning "mouth" (in Pinyin "kǒu" but that's neither here nor there) and the right particle is "馬" in Pinyin "mǎ" (and meaning "horse" but that's neither here nor there).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...

In Germany spelling bees don't exist. Took me a while to understand why it is a thing in American culture.

Not that German is "pure" but even with words you don't know you got a fair chance of being right most of the time

I haven't heard of them in England. They probably happen but do seem more of an American thing.

English is three languages smashed together with thousand of words borrowed from dozens of other languages (Latin, “Proto-German”, Norman French). There’s no other language that has such a rich vocabulary.

To me, Finnish is the only interesting language in your list, due to not being related to the rest of the Nordic languages or Russian (Finno-Ugric). It’s also purely phonetic, which is nice, but what a shame about all those case endings. I am definitely biased as I learned Finnish as a teenager.

Might as well take this opportunity to plug Bill Bryson’s book The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, it’s a fun read.

You mean Old English, proto-germanic was long gone by the time of the norman conquest