If English is superior to other languages, what makes it so?

The question does not make sense… Did you mean, “In what way is English superior to other languages?” And do you mean the written or the spoken language? Or both?

I think an advantage of English is that it is very permissive of both neologisms and foreign borrowings, whereas other languages are more ‘hesitant’ to confront new concepts via new words. To describe new technology, for instance, French tries to come up with its own competing (and frequently parodied) neologisms, and Arabic relies pretty heavily on (often directly transliterated) foreign borrowings. Neither language, therefore, comes across as very ‘confident’ about new technology.

I would suggest that by any critera, any language is as good as any other if the person speaking or writing it makes himself/herself understood to another person.

Chinese? Over 10,000 characters? Simplicity?

Probably the way certain slang words tend to be made up all the time, then used by the general population, keeps it interesting and ever-evolving.

Chun xia qiu dong. Four syllables to say spring summer fall winter.
And the characters are many, not complex..,

@dumitus After studying a few of the oriental languages, most people probably don’t understand how your characters and phonetics make it more simple, as opposed to English which phonetically differs based on some sentence structures and usage. I understand from foreign friends that it’s actually very diffcult to learn English, as far as understanding everything spoken and written.

Hm I meant to point out the simplicity in the number of letters needed to express the same idea.. maybe it’s not appropriate to say it’s simple on the basis of just that, I guess..

Ubiquity.

It may not be the easiest language to learn, but English is spoken everywhere. That has to b e its major advantage.

With all the influences of other nations’ languages, I think English is very difficult to learn. (Think of all the different meanings and pronunciations of the words with ough in them.) The grammar is so difficult that many English speakers don’t use proper grammar. It isn’t easy, but it is still becoming universal.

Everything English is superior, this is the way of things :)

English has the largest vocabulary out of any language in the world, by far. Over 400,000 words. In second place is German with 180,000. English readily borrows words from other languages, while many other languages resist that. English also readily creates new words for the purposes of science and international communication. But obviously, a lot of English’s status as the “world language” comes from the power of the US and England, and I’m sure if the official languages of those two countries were German or French, then German and French might have the same abilities as English does now.

I don’t think it is.

Hebrew does not seem a simple language to me.

Its only superiority is that it is widely understood throughout the world. The purpose of a language is to communicate and this gives English ahead start. Having a vast vocabulary is of limited value if most people aren’t familiar with the words.

tee-hee

It’s easier to learn as a second language compared to hundreds of other languages. In terms of linguistics of English:

Latin alphabet: plus
Length of words: plus
Grammatical gender: plus
Inflections: plus
Word order: plus
Subjunctive verb forms: plus
Verb tenses: minus
Choice of prepositions: minus
Spelling: minus

@mattbrowne
Pronunciation: double minus

@dxs – I couldn’t believe my ears when I listened to people from Moore, OK, on tv. They pronounced it “More”. Did I misunderstand?

Chinese: simplicity?

Hebrew: simplicity?

How? Hebrew is like French – with masculine and feminine – but with completely different characters than one is used to seeing – written from right to left – and used by only a handful of people (in the mere millions). It isn’t exactly an international language.

Chinese is, well, Chinese.

My smarter friends above wrote some better arguments: read Dom and Matt’s explanations.

@mattbrowne That’s funny because that’s how I’d pronounce it. They’re homophones. This thread has the same concept, except with the rhyming word tour.

Well I guess I should have said grammatical simplicity in the first place.

Hopefully, no more Moore tornadoes…