[Spinnaker_]

How does English compare to other languages in terms of adaptability and expression of new ideas and concepts? My intuition is that it would score much higher in these regards. I don't know if this is correct. One example would be that many newer words in English don't ever get translations in other languages, they just use the English word.

[coliveira]

Quite the opposite, English is a relatively poor language that lacks many refined elements found in many other languages such as specific gender and verbal inflection. A language like German is able to create very specific words by a well defined process, a process that is missing in English. So, while it is possible to express a lot of different meanings in English, the language is not very sophisticated at this compared to others. The big advantage enjoyed by English is the fact that it has been spread by the two imperial world powers of the last 200 years.

[jimktrains2]

Why do you consider gender inflections to be refined? Genderized things are essentially arbitrary and just something else that needs to be memorized. Even for people it gets tedious at times, hence why english has has the singular they for quite a while for referring to positions or unspecified people.

[wolfgke]

> Genderized things are [...] just something else that needs to be memorized

The same holds for the vocable - here, "nobody" complains that this is just something else that needs to be memorized. So, just consider the genus as part of the vocabulary word.

[airstrike]

> One example would be that many newer words in English don't ever get translations in other languages, they just use the English word.

I'd wager this is due to the outsized influence of American and British culture in other nations, the sheer number of people who speak English as a second or third language, and the relative ease with which certain English words can be borrowed into languages with entirely different phonemes relative to the other way around.