On 04/09/06, Francis Tyers spectre@ivixor.net wrote:
On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 10:42 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
It depends on what you mean by a simple language. English is second only to Chinese in its simplicity.
How would you define "simple" -- Personally I'm not sure that I'd say that any natural language is simple.
[greatly oversimplified history]
For a long while, English was the language of the lower classes, and its grammar simplified greatly because it wasn't used to say much more complicated than "Hey, Joe, where do we plant the turnips?" When it came back into fashion with the middle to upper classes, there were more complicated things to say (the sort of things you have time to worry about when you're not spending all your time on subsistence), so it started taking vocabulary on from elsewhere, and hasn't stopped. The vocabulary of English is *ridiculously* large compared to other European languages. The grammar is somewhat simpler. Pity about the spelling.
I don't know anything about Chinese (any of the spoken languages) to compare.
- d.