[adambard]

I am no linguist, but (I will forgive you if you stop reading right here) it seems to me that from its many linguistic influences, English has gained a relatively simple grammar (if a tragic orthography) in relation to other European languages.

It retains only a vestige of Latin's case system (i.e. she vs her) -- in Latin and some modern descendent languages all or most nouns are fair game for this treatment. Polish has 7 noun cases!

It has nearly no inflection in its conjugation, just a past and present tense for most verbs and an extra "s" in the singular third person: I/you/we/they swim/swam, he swims/swam. Contrast this with any of the Romance languages.

It has no grammatical gender, which makes it nearly unique among European languages.

The remaining strikes against it as I see them are:

* The continued presence of articles (a/an/the). The slavic languages get along just fine without them.

* Some irregular and/or inconsistent rules around punctuation, especially apostrophes and semicolons, and some remaining possessive forms (his/hers) -- these are mostly to get around contractions like he's and she's.

* The whole spelling situation is just a mess.

Edit: Bonus points for removing distinctions between (is, in essence) and (is, in a state) and (knows, information) and (knows, familiarity). In many related languages, these are 4 different verbs (In spanish ser, estar, saber, conocer).

[felxh]

I think you are correct that english grammar simplified because of the intermix with different languages. For example during the viking conquest, many viking words were very similar to english except or their grammatical endings, so people dropped them.

On the other hand, I think the irregular spelling has more to do with English never undergoing a mayor spelling reform: many times, the spelling reflects an old pronunciation. From what I know, England always had a relatively lax and pluralistic approach compared to other European countries when it came to managing its language. For example in France you have the Académie française, which essentially has authority over the French language. There is no comparable thing for English, which is probably why such reforms never took place.

Also, correct me if I am wrong, but you seem to incorrectly assume that English (or at least English grammar) stems from Latin.