Heleilu

Finally! Someone fighting against Creationist linguistic idiocy! Have any of them studied classical and modern Chinese?

Vorkosigan

Good point! Although the spoken langauge was undoubtedly more complex than spoken mandarin, just as Taiwanese, Cantonese and the other languages are today much more complex than Mandarin.

Michael

DireStraits

How complex is English? It is recognised as being the most difficult language for a foreigner to learn, it has more irregular verbs that any other, at 184. It's spelling and pronunciation would have driven a latin speaker to distraction.

Given these factors, I would say it is probably one of, if not the most complex languages in world history.

Buckster

Well, I know of one creationist that is working pretty hard toward evolving the English language: President Bush. And I think we'd better not misunderestimate him on this one...

lpetrich

Latin??? There is nobody today who has Latin as their native language. However, that may be correct for Romance-language speakers; those speakers' languages are descendants of Latin.

And where was this "recognized"???

Also, English irregular verbs are easier than this description implies; English verb morphology is very simple, and one has to learn only an extra one or two forms for nearly all of them. And though English has a large number of compound verb tenses, all of them are regularly formed.

And while I will concede that English spelling might best be described as semi-logographic, there are lots of rules that work much of the time. English spelling isn't as bad as either Chinese or Japanese spelling, IMO. And as to English being difficult to pronounce, I don't see what's the great difficulty. While some English sounds are not very common, one can find plenty of tongue-twisters in other languages, such as Chinese tones.

I think that one indicator of language difficulty might be how long it takes to achieve some reasonable level of proficiency; that can be estimated from the lengths of various language courses. I recall from somewhere the lengths of various courses offered by some US government agency to various people who need to learn other languages. Spanish requires a relatively short course, while German requires a longer course, Russian a longer course, and Arabic or Japanese an even longer course.

NeilUnreal

Modern English is a great lingua franca because it developed (in part) as a lingua franca. When widespread travel began, it got caught in a positive feedback loop.

-Neil