[gwervc]

Plus there is another 1/3 coming from Latin which French speakers has no issue understanding either. English is basically akin to a dumbed down pidgin of French (exponentially less verb conjugation, no gender agreement, less pronouns with the thou/you merge, less articles and annoying small words, etc.) starting over a Germanic core.

[FridayoLeary]

Harsh but that rings true. In it's defense i'll point out that English is exponentially more useful in the modern world and even French has started borrowing nouns from English. Also English has more words then any other language which in my mind makes it the best. (to clarify i know a little of other languages and i understand that there are concepts which English is not even equipped to express properly but i stand by what i write)

I'm still learning, English is huge and it can be a delight to discover.

[jandrewrogers]

Most words in foreign languages that most people believe don’t have an English equivalent often do, but the English word is so obscure that almost no native English speaker knows it, and as you point out, English vocabulary is so large that no one will ever come close to learning it all. English is the C++ of human languages.

What interests me is the prominence of words in foreign languages that have an extremely obscure equivalent in English. Like, why do they devote common vocabulary to it and what does it mean that they do?

I have been conversational in languages almost no one learns from parts of the world no one cares about. They are full of words like this and I still use those words in English because that was the first word I learned for the concept. But when I’ve taken the time to see if an equivalent English word exists, it always does. Ironically, it is safer to assume that my ignorance of the English language (my native language) is more likely than the lack of a word in English for a thing.

[teleforce]

> English is the C++ of human languages

You can say that again.

That's exactly what I'm alluding in my other comments thread but referring to Chinese language and writing system complexity rather than English for the C++ and Rust, but on second thought Rust probably be the Chinese equivalent.

> But when I’ve taken the time to see if an equivalent English word exists, it always does.

It's the same happen with C++ that has been ripping up Dlang features for quite sometimes now including its new module system [1].

[1] Converting a large mathematical software package written in C++ to C++20 modules (42 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44433899