[zjp]

"English being my second language, I curse it everyday and wish it could be more like, say, Hungarian, in which such a thing as a spelling bee would be unthinkable."

I love this about English! We are the most prolific word thieves of all time. We even stole an entire grammatically complete sentence from French ("Je ne sais quoi").

If you want English to be more like Hungarian, start inserting Hungarian words into sentences otherwise written in English and I guarantee people will adopt them as loanwords in short order. Never define them, we'll figure it out from context and vibes, and we'll never pronounce them correctly, which might make it grating to listen to them spoken back to you. But you can absolutely just incept words into English. We'll take them. We're hoarders. We all love that shit.

My favorite thing about it is the register system that developed from all this theft. There are at least three: German, French, and Latin. German is less formal, and French and Latin are often equal but differ in that French is less bureaucratic than Latin. The start, commencement, and initiation of something are different. And an initiation is different from an inauguration. You ask your friend, question a witness, and interrogate a suspect. Greek is more abstract than Latin. A moral question is nearer to the heart than an ethical question. You diagnose a disease, you judge a person. You have compassion, you merely feel sympathy.

Though, I would hate to learn it as a second language for the exact same reasons.

[theasisa]

> If you want English to be more like Hungarian, start inserting Hungarian words into sentences otherwise written in English

I've been doing something like this with Finnish (which is in the same language family as Hungary) - I use Finnish colloquialism but directly translated into English. Things like "going ass first up a tree" (meaning doing something in a sub-optimal way) or "better on the ground than in the devil's mouth" (when you spill something). I find it amusing.

The author is right though, the English language is dreadful; In Finnish the words are written and pronounced the same way. Try that with some names of cities or towns in England.

[zjp]

Going ass first up a tree is funny enough to catch on if you keep using it. It fills a real semantic gap in the idea space of taking great pains to do something the wrong way. I'll never forget reading it just now.

Come on now though, dreadful. There's something beautiful about a language that's a fusion reactor for all other languages on Earth.

[PollardsRho]

A lot of expressions in English started out as calques, outputs that process: you're paving the way!

[swores]

> "Try that with some names of cities or towns in England."

Are you suggesting it's not intuitively obvious that the town 'Towcester' should be pronounced the same as a "toaster" for toasting bread?

[IsTom]

I think a lot of what the author has an issue with is related to the Great Vowel Shift, not necessarily loanwords.

[scoot]

> English being my second language, I curse it everyday

"every day"

Perhaps the author should check grammar while he checks spelling :D (Not the only issue I noticed, and I didn't read the entire article...)

[xnx]

> I love this about English! We are the most prolific word thieves of all time.

It's impressive. English language: ~500,000 words. German language: ~135,000 words.

[Antibabelic]

Where do these numbers come from?

[kalterdev]

The way English uses this vast vocabulary is beautiful.

[webdevver]

the zeitgeist hungers for loanwords