Merriam-Webster is 100% certain otherwise:
blond or blonde. Function: noun. Date:1822
a person having blond hair—spelled blond when used of a boy or man and usually blonde when used of a girl or woman.
Need Some (Grammatical) Relationship Advice
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Merriam-Webster is 100% certain otherwise:
blond or blonde. Function: noun. Date:1822
a person having blond hair—spelled blond when used of a boy or man and usually blonde when used of a girl or woman.
This is part of my thinking when I am dealing with a language that has grammatical gender, but other languages often use gender that matches sex in words that are for people and animals.
You have gone over several reasons why English is superior to many other languages, and I certainly am glad that I have as my primary language one that does not have gender for any but a few nouns and personal pronouns, and even more importantly a languages that is not inflected. German isn't all that bad, but some languages have many inflections. I beiieve that Lithuanian is the champ, but I may be mistaken.
It's been true since early Middle English; there's a tiny cluster of loan adjectives that have kept gender; s.v. brunet and brunette.
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And yet many speakers of inflected languages love the subtlety and flexibility that inflection brings. And many speakers of tonal languages find non-tonal languages flat and rather dull. And so on.
English isn't inherently superior to any other language. Nor is it inferior. It's lovely that you like your native language so very well, but I'd be wary of saying that it's "superior to many other languages" in mixed linguistic company. It may not have quite the effect you're striving for.
They can love it all they like. I won't go into it now, but I am of the opinion that language, in general, has evolved over the eons, and inflections were something that is being dropped as languages develop. But this is not the place to put that forth.
I have expressed such opinions among persons of mixed languages, and they have usually agreed with me.
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There is a material difference between the notion that languages simplify through time (a given in linguist circles) and the idea that that makes English somehow superior. It's the latter notion which I doubt would fly in multilingual circles.
TheNighSwan
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That is a commonly held belief (mostly by speakers of western European languages) that happens to be completely false. Some languages lose inflections over time, but some other languages *gain* inflection over time.
The gender and case system of modern Russian is more complicated than that of the Old Slavonic language, for instance.
There is no goal to language transformation, language can change in any direction, gaining or losing phonemes, morphemes, irregularities, and so on.
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I'd argue that English is hardly the simplest of Western European languages either. I will preface this by saying I am not a linguist, and the only other language I've studied at all is Spanish (so if I'm wrong, please correct me 
). But it's my understanding that English is considered fairly difficult for non-native speakers to master.
). But it's my understanding that English is considered fairly difficult for non-native speakers to master.
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TheNighSwan
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English is indeed complex in many respects —which of course native speakers are unaware of (just like native speakers of Russian don't see what's so difficult with noun declension).
A start is phonology; it varies based on dialect and analysis, but English has between twenty vowels and diphthong, in a system that is rather uncommon around the world; most languages are happy with just 5 or 7 vowels.
Likewise, English allows rather complex syllable structure, with very often two or three consonants in a row, and sometimes up to five ("Armstrong"), where many languages just build their syllables allong a strict consonant-vowel-consonant pattern.
Appart from that, English grammar is complex because the complexity that is lost with inflection is rendered with syntax instead. English word order is both strict and complex. Again, native speakers won't see what's the big deal (just as native speakers of Bantu languages don't see what's the problem with having a dozen distinct grammatical genders), but to foreign learner it's not that simple:
They have to learn to use definite and indefinite articles properly; many languages don't have articles at all, and those who do don't necessarily use them in ways that are perfectly equivalent to English usage (French requires the definite article before all country names unless the country is a city-state or an island-nation, for instance).
They have to learn the complex tense/aspect system of English.
English speakers take so much for granted that it's "she lives in New York" but "she's doing the dishes", which in the past tense turns to "she lived in New York" and "she has done the dishes" that they don't even realise that there might be something complex here to explain, and that not all languages do things this way (even a German speaker is completely at loss here, even though German has theorically the same tenses than English, but uses them in a quite different fashion).
They have to learn how relative clauses, comparative and superlative structures work —many language do these in ways that are very different from English, and even those who do it in relatively similar way might have trouble (French and English theorically use the same kind of structure for comparives and superlatives; except "aussi grand que"<>"plus grand que" is really not quite the same as "as tall as"<>"taller than" and it takes time to get used to!)
There the whole deal about "the man (that) I know" —even native speakers of English sometimes have argument about when it's ok to drop the "that" in this kind of sentence, so imagine foreign speakers trying to figure out this mess!
One thing that took a lot of time for me to get uses is that the 3rd person possessive adjectives of English (his/her/their) agree in natural gender with the possessor, whereas in French, they agree simultaneously in number with the possessor, but in grammatical gender and number with the possessee. So I sometimes want to write "his dog" because I know it's a male dog even though I know the dog's owner is actually a girl.
I imagine Spanish speakers have similar difficulties when they want to translate "su", which convey all of "his", "her", "its" and "their"'s meanings, except it still has to agree in number with the possessee!
On a more basic level, English question and negation syntax is very tricky for beginners, who have to learn which "is it?", "does it?" or "has it?" is the correct form for a given sentence, compounded with tense difficulties as well.
"Did he go to the store?" is not an intuitive way to turn "He went to the store" into a question for a Spanish or an Italian speaker, who would simply rather take the affirmative sentence and add a rising intonation at the end!
So no, there is nothing inherently simple about English, that's really just a native speaker bias to claim this.
A start is phonology; it varies based on dialect and analysis, but English has between twenty vowels and diphthong, in a system that is rather uncommon around the world; most languages are happy with just 5 or 7 vowels.
Likewise, English allows rather complex syllable structure, with very often two or three consonants in a row, and sometimes up to five ("Armstrong"), where many languages just build their syllables allong a strict consonant-vowel-consonant pattern.
Appart from that, English grammar is complex because the complexity that is lost with inflection is rendered with syntax instead. English word order is both strict and complex. Again, native speakers won't see what's the big deal (just as native speakers of Bantu languages don't see what's the problem with having a dozen distinct grammatical genders), but to foreign learner it's not that simple:
They have to learn to use definite and indefinite articles properly; many languages don't have articles at all, and those who do don't necessarily use them in ways that are perfectly equivalent to English usage (French requires the definite article before all country names unless the country is a city-state or an island-nation, for instance).
They have to learn the complex tense/aspect system of English.
English speakers take so much for granted that it's "she lives in New York" but "she's doing the dishes", which in the past tense turns to "she lived in New York" and "she has done the dishes" that they don't even realise that there might be something complex here to explain, and that not all languages do things this way (even a German speaker is completely at loss here, even though German has theorically the same tenses than English, but uses them in a quite different fashion).
They have to learn how relative clauses, comparative and superlative structures work —many language do these in ways that are very different from English, and even those who do it in relatively similar way might have trouble (French and English theorically use the same kind of structure for comparives and superlatives; except "aussi grand que"<>"plus grand que" is really not quite the same as "as tall as"<>"taller than" and it takes time to get used to!)
There the whole deal about "the man (that) I know" —even native speakers of English sometimes have argument about when it's ok to drop the "that" in this kind of sentence, so imagine foreign speakers trying to figure out this mess!
One thing that took a lot of time for me to get uses is that the 3rd person possessive adjectives of English (his/her/their) agree in natural gender with the possessor, whereas in French, they agree simultaneously in number with the possessor, but in grammatical gender and number with the possessee. So I sometimes want to write "his dog" because I know it's a male dog even though I know the dog's owner is actually a girl.
I imagine Spanish speakers have similar difficulties when they want to translate "su", which convey all of "his", "her", "its" and "their"'s meanings, except it still has to agree in number with the possessee!
On a more basic level, English question and negation syntax is very tricky for beginners, who have to learn which "is it?", "does it?" or "has it?" is the correct form for a given sentence, compounded with tense difficulties as well.
"Did he go to the store?" is not an intuitive way to turn "He went to the store" into a question for a Spanish or an Italian speaker, who would simply rather take the affirmative sentence and add a rising intonation at the end!
So no, there is nothing inherently simple about English, that's really just a native speaker bias to claim this.
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I work in an English-speaking company based in Europe. So the majority of the people I deal with on a day to day basis are not native speakers. And TheNighSwan's overview of some of the pitfalls of the laguage is accurate.
There are "tells" for whether someone is a native speaker of (just picking the people I talk to a lot) Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian, or Mandarin. Each language group has things that they find difficult to get right because English is quirky and weird in comparison to their native tongues. We muddle along, because the fact of communication is more important than the form, but we're not speaking English because it's inherently superior. We're speaking it because between the British Empire and American economic/cultural influence, it's a global language.
I've also been watching my children's classmates learn English (they start studying it at about 9 here). They're effectively semi-immersed in the language as soon as they're old enough to read, because only very small kids' cartoons are dubbed instead of subtitled. And it's still hard, even though they hear it as they read the translations, and even though their native language is about the closest one to English around.
English is weird and difficult. Being a native speaker is an irreducible advantage in many situations. But none of this is because the language is superior to (or inferior to) any other one on the planet.
There are "tells" for whether someone is a native speaker of (just picking the people I talk to a lot) Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian, or Mandarin. Each language group has things that they find difficult to get right because English is quirky and weird in comparison to their native tongues. We muddle along, because the fact of communication is more important than the form, but we're not speaking English because it's inherently superior. We're speaking it because between the British Empire and American economic/cultural influence, it's a global language.
I've also been watching my children's classmates learn English (they start studying it at about 9 here). They're effectively semi-immersed in the language as soon as they're old enough to read, because only very small kids' cartoons are dubbed instead of subtitled. And it's still hard, even though they hear it as they read the translations, and even though their native language is about the closest one to English around.
English is weird and difficult. Being a native speaker is an irreducible advantage in many situations. But none of this is because the language is superior to (or inferior to) any other one on the planet.
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