gambit
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Speaking about yourself?
Whose 'therefore'? More like yours. This is the second time you have made an assumption of my arguments. The issue is less about how many sounds does a particular language has compared to another but more about CLASSES of languages whose phonemes and written forms allow flexibility to produce complex words. In that, the Romance and Slavic are in the same class.
Of course they would, but in going back to Hawaiian as an example, currently we are going through the Christmas season. The Hawaiian language has no allowance for the letter 'r' and 'y', and the 'chr', 'st', and 'as' clusters. The result is the song 'Mele Kalikimaka' to represent 'Merry Christmas'. The adaptation of the word 'christmas' involved an increase in the usage of EXISTING allowance of sounds inside the new words, not an increase in the sounds themselves that are allowed to pervade the language structure. There lies the difference between languages.
Chinese and Japanese are usually the butt of jokes when it comes to the letters 'R' and 'L'. Is it because Chinese and Japanese are genetically incapable of rolling and raising the tongue like apes are? Absurd. But then why do we continue to see this difficulty among Japanese and Chinese? In fact, the letters 'R' and 'L' phonetically do exist in Chinese and Japanese but because both languages are not as phonotactical as English, the letters are what is called 'prosodically constrained' by linguists...
Prosody (linguistics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In other words, even though Chinese is a 'tonal' language, prosody is about the FREEDOM to use tones to express oneself in phonetic form. Those that are called 'tonal' languages where...
Tone (linguistics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
There will be limited uses for certain sounds and it is because of the duration the speaker spent inside the language that limited his experience with a sound that he would have difficulty creating that sound in a different language. Whereas phonotactical languages like the Romance class have no such difficulty in both usage of existing phoneme allowance and adoption of new ones to allow the speaker to learn newly adopted words. The irony cannot be more striking: Tonal or lyrical languages are prosodically restricted while phonotactical languages are free to exercise the speaker's emotions as he wish through speech.
I learned conversational English in less than one year in Hawaii, the state with practically the worst educational system in the 1970s. I learned it quickly with no problems with the letters 'R' and 'L' typical of Chinese and Japanese children in my age group and Hawaii is the 'gateway' to the US for Asia. Vietnamese has those letters but no complex consonant clusters found in the word 'Christmas', but I had no problem pronouncing it correctly the first time while my Chinese and Japanese classmates struggled with it. I did it not because I was a genius but simply because the Viet language has built-in allowances for the speaker to learn new sounds in other languages. Does not need to actually adapt the new word. Just need to allow the speaker to learn new sounds.
Likewise with the written form. If a person goes 'Huh?' upon hearing/seeing the word 'phonotactical', we can easily teach him the idea of what 'phonotactics' is by using other ideas: 'phonetics', 'tactical', and 'flexile'. He would know that phonetics involves sounds and flexile involves bending and variations of forms. He would also know that the word 'tactical' usually imply a fluidic situation. What this mean is that while the written form of an alphabetical language can be longer than an ideogrammatical one to convey any message, a complex word whose concept can be represented by two or more words in combinations is the equal of said ideogram language in reduction of forms to convey messages.
To sum it up: Even though people can replace a sound with another, the substitute is usually inferior in representing the idea and sometimes can create confusion. A phonotactical language like English has little problems with this in both written and phonetic forms.
Wrong and the Hawaiian, Chinese, and Japanese languages examples I provided proved you wrong. None of them have allowances for many letters/sounds and/or complex consonant clusters, least of all Hawaiian. Do not confuse creation of a new word using existing sounds with the sounds themselves.
The Japanese word 'kakuteiru' is neither an adaptation nor adoption of 'cocktail' but a mongrel constrained by structures. Same for 'jintonikku' for 'gin and tonic' or 'sutoroberi' for 'strawberry'.
The 'richness of vocabulary' is meaningless rhetoric intended to elevate oneself onto a higher moral plane in this debate and to elicit worthless 'Thank' from those who would mindlessly 'Thank' anyone who would exhibit the least amount of anti-Americanism in his posts. But the reality is that the amount of vocabulary is constrained by the structure of the language itself. This is not about cultures but about science.
This is not about English or French or German as individual languages but about the inherent built-in advantages they together have to facilitate new ideas, particularly new scientific discoveries and alphabetical languages have proven themselves most quickly adaptive.
You are only partially correct about English. Even though Anglo-Saxon is the foundation of English, over 70% of English's vocabulary came from other languages. That is unprecedented in linguistics and what is even more fascinating to linguists is that the nature of what is 'English' does not change as a language throughout the centuries. Yes, we no longer uses 'thou' or 'goest' but their discard does not render the language as unrecognizable. Languages are invented, never discovered, and as an invention, English as a phonotactical language is seconded only by German. English as a language to transmit ideas is used globally while even though Chinese can claim numerical superiority, Chinese is used mostly within China, same for Vietnamese or for Japanese, within their own borders.
The point for English as a global language to transmit ideas is that the language itself can be easily exploited only to the level that is needed. The Chinese boasts that their languages require the speaker to memorize literally thousands of characters in order to communicate. That is a terrible burden for anyone. That does not mean English is any less formidable in volume. To date, the people over at Webster and Oxford estimated that there are at least TWO MILLIONS words in the English vocabulary.
aardvark: Afrikaans
polka: Czech
moose: Algonquin
teepee: Dakota
alcohol: Arabic
skill: Danish
poncho: Arauncanian
boss: Dutch
boomerang: Australian
oasis: Egyptian
zebra: Bantu
sauna: Finnish
anchovy: Basque
kindergarten: German
bungalow: Bengali
jaguar: Guarani
typhoon: Cantonese
jukebox: Gullah
hurricane: Carib
canoe: Haitian creole
Eskimo: Cree
ukulele: Hawaiian
camel: Hebrew
bazaar: Persian
saber: Hungarian
mazurka: Polish
The above is a very very very small list of common English everyday words that has origins elsewhere. Not counting the sciences and engineering. When you said that people used English because it is a language of commerce, read 'money', you are also partially correct but superficially so. If people gravitate towards something they believe to be useful, then English is a natural tool not just for commerce, read 'money', but also for science and engineering and for ordinary communication across and over cultures. When people look at English, they see bits and pieces of their languages. It is indisputable among linguists that English is the ONLY language that has NEVER rejected a word because of origin. Perhaps the Chinese members of this forum can contribute a similar list?
As the Frenchman argues passionately on whether the transistor should be male or female, his engineer son would roll his eyes and speak English to his peers across the Channel, transistor gender be damned. English and German are so closely related that in a 1990 NY Times article, Enno von Lowenstern of Die Welt, showed that he could write a German article for his employer using 90% English nouns. Keyword search for you 'enno von lowenstern english uber alles'.
Fidel you-know-who said...
Looking at Language Archives
Chinese to replace English as a global language of convenience and choice? At least not in this lifetime.
and Leng (as in 冷
...At worst, both tactics are equal, but at best, it is the Japanese who has the advantage. Instead of searching their language for distinct words that define elements of a machine and of thinking and cobbled them together to form a new word, like how you just demonstrated with Chinese, the Japanese simply use whatever sounds they are allowed in their language and adapted them to the English 'computer'. It is less labor intensive, mentally speaking, and it facilitate quicker adoption, as in over time. You have completely missed the point of the list I gave in post 121 where English accept these foreign words and how that made English a much more flexile language than most. The Japanese...By adapting their current available sounds to best match how the foreign word sound in its own language, they made the Japanese language a bit more flexile than Chinese. So why should anyone learn Chinese over Japanese if he has a choice?
