| In my experience, it's the lack of logical rules that many other languages follow that bothers people. Here are a few examples. Pronunciation - you make a fair point. In particular. Elision - other languages drop more unstressed sounds, allowing phrases to roll off the tongue more easily and smoothly. From Latin on, most romance languages have a healthy amount of elision. In Spanish, this chaining of words is referred to as enlace or encadenamiento. SVO - English relies on Subject-Verb-Object order to express what is being done by whom and to what. Compared to languages that use cases to do this, it can feel a bit tedious and disjointed. In general, case-based languages like Latin, do a good job of showing off what is happening given just a few words. Word order - beyond SVO, english relies on strange, rarely-codified rules of word order, making it hard for even native speakers to sound conversationally proficient. For example, the adjective rule is maddening: https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjecti... Unpredictable declensions and conjugations - "I go, I did go, I went, I have gone" is way crazier than languages that are more rules-based regarding how words are constructed. Borrows - I love how many words and phrases English has taken from other languages, but it loses internal cohesiveness due to its variety of external influences. |