I don't quite agree with this. English is only rich because it is influenced by many other languages over the years. English words that are not borrowed by other languages are a lot less than greek/russian/arabic ones.
It's true that English borrowed a lot, but this is also why it is so rich. English is a hybrid language created on the merger of Old French (itself a variant of Latin with a lot of borrowing from Greek and some from Gaulish Celt), Old English (aka Anglo-Saxon) and Old Norse (through the Vikings of the Danelaw).
You can attest of this diversity in
this post. If you have learnt French or another Romance language, it is fairly easy to tell Germanic words from Latin ones in English. But unless you are well-versed in Germanic linguistic, you may not realise that even Germanic words have multiple origins. For example, "house" comes from Old Norse, but "home" from Anglo-Saxon. They originally meant the same, but "home" has come to be used differently with time (in a way not found in most languages, in such expressions as "home-sick", "home sweet home", "home alone", or "go home").
Another reason for the richness of English is that it is very flexible and new words can be coin quite easily (e.g. I have been
googling). Many new terms in sciences, technologies or lifestyle also appeared first in English because of the importance of English speaking countries in the 19th and 20th centuries. Pretty much every terms specific to computering, aviation, aerospace, or recent genetics (e.g. haplogroup, genomics, introns), for instance, first appeared in English. Even words that sound Greek and are built on Greek roots, are in fact English (e.g. telephone, technocracy, heterozygosity, meiosis), because that is the language in which they were coined and first used.
A third factor is the diversity of regional English. No other language on Earth has ever been spoken (by native speakers) on such a geographic scale as English. British English is already varied enough - especially the hybridised Gaelic version that are Scottish and Welsh English. Add to that Irish English, American English, South African English, Indian English, Singaporian English, Australian English... not just with their regional terms and expressions, but all their slang too. No language has more regional and slang terms than English.
What i dont like in french is the fact that there is no rule for whether something is male or female.
This is not entirely true. Genders in French are inherited from Latin, and will 99% of the time be the same in Italian. So if you have learnt Italian and don't know if a French word is masculine or feminine, think about the Italian equivalent, which gender you can determine with the final vowel (o = masculine, a = feminine). For example, if you wonder whether
oiseau is masculine or feminine, the Italian is
uccello, so it is masculine in French too. You still need to know the gender of Italian words in -e, which can be either. But at least you won't mistake for about 80% of the words.
I love the way japanese sounds but I dont like that many words are sooo similar to each other. Makes it harder to learn..
I agree. I am often irritated by the excess of homonyms in Japanese. It's good for puns though.
Greek: my native language. I love it cause of the fact that everything has a reason to be called the way it is called, it's not random, if you analyse the etymology of greek words you will see what i mean.
That is also the case in German, for the most part.
