[vorg]

> an enormous literary corpus reaching back to before English even existed

Certainly true of Telegu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam. But because Bengali is, like English, an Indo-European language, not true of it. Also, not sure what you mean by "etc".

[nine_k]

Sanskrit is also Indo-European, and definitely had a large literary corpus before English became separate from Old Norse.

[mdns33]

Let the regional language wars begin.

[eponeponepon]

Aren't most wars about regional languages, when you get down to the nuts and bolts?

[panglott]

English is less than 1,000 years old in its identifiably modern form.