The astonishing primitiveness of English

Introduction added later for clarification:

From the fact that this article is written in English doesn't follow that it's directed at native English speakers. It most assuredly isn't. To try to convince a person that his native language is primitive is pointless, counterproductive and extremely impolite. I would never do it any more than I'd ever tell a man his wife is ugly.

Therefore, dear native English speakers, especially monolingual ones, you are advised not to read this article. If you do read it and feel offended, don't tell me I didn't warn you beforehand that the article was not meant for you.

I've written the article in English for the simple reason that English is the lingua franca in almost the entire world as well as undeservedly worshipped by countless people who, noticing the enormous achievements of the English civilization, make the completely unfounded conclusion that the English language is superior to the others.

This article is a call to non-native English speakers to stop holding the English language for something divine. Just because the USA have a much higher standard of living than your country doesn't mean that you should mold your use of your native language after the English language. English is a convenient tool for us to communicate across language barriers and nothing more.



When I heard an American gentleman in the Philippines say that the Tagalog language is difficult, I thought I had seen one of the world's greatest linguistic retards. But the article "The Steep Learning Curve of the English Language", written by a gentleman from Panama, really left me gasping for air in utter astonishment. "If you’re in the process of learning English as a second language, you probably know by now that it takes a lot of patience and concentration to make it sink into your brain." Hello? Are you sure you mean English, the language originating from England? You mean, your brain can master all those complicated verb forms in Spanish and you call English difficult just because occasionally one word can have several meanings??

If so, English must be the ONLY foreign language which the author of that article has ever tried to learn. Now, regrettably I am fluent in only four foreign languages, but I have studied – to a greater or lesser extent – dozens of them, and I assure you that among those, English is the easiest to acquire. In fact, I have never studied English. It has just stuck to me by itself – over many years, I admit, but the reward-to-efford ratio, compared to any other language, is unbelievable.
(In case anyone wonders, the reason why I never studied English was that by the time I began to need English, I was already so good at it that it didn't make any sense to study – all I needed was practice.)

It is undeniable that among the European languages, English has the most primitive grammar by far. Since English shares a lot of vocabulary with languages like French and German, not to mention the huge common cultural heritage, it is easy to overlook that grammatically it is worlds apart from them and, indeed, only little steps away from the languages like Chinese and Malay.

English being an almost-isolating language, it is really curious that even the rudiments of grammar it has still retained seem too much for its native speakers. They are doing all they can to make their language even more isolating. Like, they embraced the Chinese phrase "long time no see," meaning "I haven't seen you for a long time," or "It's been long since the last time you and I met." Now, in Chinese you have to talk like that because those grammatical forms you would need to convey all those nuances of meaning don't exist. In English, they do exist, but the native English speakers seem to enjoy the pursuit of primitivity. They are too stupid to even write "fashist" instead of "fascist". A follower of communism is called a communist, but a follower of Sandino is called a sandinista. (But when a revolutionary is Cuban, is he then a communista?) It's friggin' unreal. They just take words from various languages and won't even change them so they'd fit suitably into their language's context.

Another phenomenon to the same effect is that when translating from English, one routinely sees sentences to which one has to add words like "if", "then", "but", "because" and such. The English have those words, too, but for some reason they choose not to use them unless it's absolutely inevitable. In any normal language, people say: "If you do that, then you'll get in trouble." You can say so in English as well, but many, if not most of them prefer to say "You do that, you'll get in trouble." They seem to have an obsession with making the language as short as possible. "Ever see it before?" instead of "Have you ever seen it before?", or this amazing example from a TV series: an Irish-American police officer saying to a traffic accident survivor (not exactly a Polynesian either): "You any pain?"

What is absolutely incredible about the English language is its incapability to build new words. When they get a new concept, they can't just add a couple of suffixes to an existing word, unite a couple into a compound word or invent something completely new. Instead, they shorten a long description into an acronym (laser, radar - which, I admit, are very convenient except that the method has very limited uses), or just take anything from their environment which can be at least vaguely associated with the new concept – for instance, a person's name. A raincoat is called a macintosh, rubber boots are called wellingtons. A machine for lifting heavy objects is, would you believe, called a crane. A crane is a bird, for crying out loud! Curiously, I once read an article where the English speakers were sneering at the primitiveness of the Thai language. Like, one guy told how he pointed at a crane (the machine) and asked his girlfriend what it's called in Thai, and she said they don't have a word for it. I fail to see what the English found so funny, because they don't have a word for it either. The best they could come up with was to name it after a creature which roughly resembled its shape.

Or look at the computer peripheral device called "mouse". Sure enough, it is called "mouse" in every language I know, but that is only because they mindlessly ape English which is a prestige language for them. But imagine that the device would have been invented by the Germans or Russians or French. Imagine a meeting where the boss praises the inventors and says something like: "You're great guys! This is one of the most remarkable inventions in the history of computers. By the way, what do you propose we'll call it?" The chief inventor says: "Mouse." The boss: "I beg you pardon?" The inventor: "Mouse. We want to call this thing the mouse, because, you know, it's, like, white, and roughly of the size of a small animal." The boss frowns and tells him to come closer and breathe. Not smelling any alcohol, he'll be slightly confused, but still suggest that the chief inventor go home and take a couple of days off – he has really worked hard the last months and deserves some rest.

It is beyond ludicrous how the English language keeps using the existing words unchanged to name new concepts. They ride in their motor cars. They sail across the outer space in their spaceships. I read a science fiction novel where the smaller spacecraft were called cutters and sloops, and one of the officers on a SPACESHIP was called Sailing Master. (I swear I'm not making this up.) I wonder how the English ever came across the word "rifle". "Boom-stick" would have been more like them.
Added much later: I couldn't believe my eyes when I accidentally found out that "rifle" isn't even the word for the type of weapon. It refers to the way the inside of the barrel is processed. Meaning, I was even more right than I had thought.

Not yet has English reached the level of some South East Asian languages where you would have to say "island island" for "islands", and "I go theatre yesterday" because there is no past tense, and the question "have you meeting today?" would be ambiguous (it could mean "are you going to have" as well as "have you had"). But we can already see things like "France woman" written on the Internet – apparently the word "French" is too much mental effort for some.

Now, all that said, I have to stress that English has two big merits.

Firstly, it is perfectly suited for international communication because it's so easy to learn.

Secondly, writing in English is a very useful exercise which I totally recommend to everyone. That is because it forces you to express yourself as simply as possible. What would be merely a difficult sentence in German becomes absolutely unreadable in English, as even remotely complex concepts are likely to require at least half a dozen words. Therefore – as I have the tendency to stretch the expressiveness of my native language to its limits – I am grateful for having English to bring me down to Earth and practice expressing myself in short simple sentences. (They may not always be short and simple in English, but they are in my Estonian thoughts.)

Both of those have their downside.

Firstly, the speakers of non-English languages tend to look up to English as some sort of a noble, even divine form of communication. I keep seeing how the Estonians are reluctant to use the full extent of their language's possibilities, as they perceive it somehow unseemly to say things one couldn't say in English. Like, when there is an English word which can mean two completely different things, and the reader will always have to guess by the context which one is meant (and often a lengthy explanation is necessary), whereas there are two distinct words in Estonian, the Estonians nevertheless feel that they should use only one word like the English do. The indiscriminate awe for everything English is horrifyingly destroying the language instinct of the Estonians, confusing and primitivising our language.

Let me give you just one example (which is short enough to be comfortably explained in English). I remember I saw an article where a young woman suggested that we stop distinguishing between "number" and "digit" because the English language doesn't distinguish between them. Obviously she was mistaken. She simply didn't know the English word "digit", and thought there was none. But that's a minor problem. It is human to err. What really horrified me was the kind of mindset "if English doesn't have it, our language mustn't either". Imagine that I would write that Vietnamese doesn't have two separate words for "blue" and "green", so we should also give up that distinction and start using only one word which means both "blue" and "green". People would think I'm insane. But substitute "English" for "Vietnamese" and many people would nod and say: well, yes, if there is no distinction in English then there's no point having it in Estonian.
Secondly, it is not only your expressions the English languages forces you to simplify, it does the same to your thoughts. Since it is close to impossible to express very complex concepts in English, you'll eventually notice yourself simplifying your thoughts even before putting them into English words.

Now, I know what some of you are saying – since I know my native language better than English, I merely have the illusion that the English language is less expressive. It's not actually the language's fault, you may say, it is my insufficient knowledge of its possibilities.

That would indeed be a very likely explanation, if we were to observe only English and my native language. However, you'll be proven wrong when we add German and Russian into the picture. My English is better than my German, and much better than my Russian. Nevertheless, I routinely find myself astonished at the expressiveness I am seeing in Russian-language books, compared to English-language books. And I am not reading anything like the 19th-century literature. I would hardly be able to understand that in Russian. I read, in both English and Russian, contemporary books written for the common people. And I'm telling you, the difference in the richness of nuances is amazing.

Another indication of the same phenomenon is that every now and then, when writing in English, I find myself in a situation where I feel that what I've written or am just about to write is not exactly what I want to express. It's almost right, but not quite. And I realise that if I were writing in German or Russian, I could just choose a different grammatical form of a word, or a relatively brief expression. Indeed, when I do write in German or Russian, I end up spending considerable time with dictionaries all right, but I do get to express exactly the meaning I want. In English, however, I am often frustrated to find out that the grammatical form or a brief expression doesn't exist. So I would have to write several sentences just to explain that different nuance to the reader. Usually I don't bother, settling instead for a concise word or expression which is not exactly what I want to say but close enough.

The same problem occurs when you are translating from English. The obvious ambiguity – like "crane" meaning either the bird or the machine – is no problem because you can pretty much always deduct from the context which one of the two is meant. The real problem is with what I call the subtle ambiguity. It's when one English word means two or three similar (but different) concepts. When you ask the author which one he meant, he'll be like "why, they're the same thing", and you can't explain to him that they aren't. What do you do with a blind person who won't believe that such a thing as eyesight exists?

And so the English monolinguals write books full of vague language, thinking it is quite normal and never realising what they are missing and how the concepts are blurred in their heads. Therefore I find it baffling that more than half of all the scientific literature in the world is written in English. I feel genuinely sorry for the people who have to do science in English. I can't imagine how it is possible to write anything scientific in such an ambiguos and grammarless language. It is thinkable that they achieve exactness by using slightly anglicised Latin words for everything they need to express clearly. I wouldn't know because I'm not that much involved in science. What I do read a lot, though, is legal texts, and I can assure you that the English legal language is a horror show – a striking contrast to the preciseness and clarity of the legal texts in German. (Yes, the Germans write theoretical works which are near-unreadably abstract, but in English you can easily get the same amount of confusion reading a mere contract.)

So, it's a kind of a love-hate thing. Strictly speaking, English is a joke of a language. On the other hand, it's a near-perfect tool for communicating one's (not-too-abstract) thoughts to the speakers of other languages. I mean, it's horrifying to imagine that we'd all have to learn Latin (or even German) in order to communicate with one another.

I wish I'd find out one day what it is that makes English so amazingly easy to learn. Ideas, anybody?