I say, you european languages, using 26 or slightly more alphabets, you had a great chance to make your language simple and easy to learn, why do you make it so

I say, you european languages, using 26 or slightly more alphabets, you had a great chance to make your language simple and easy to learn, why do you make it so complicated? Except, of course, most European languages are intermingled with other languages so intrinsically that they don't stand on their own. Look in an English dictionary at how many times you see "from <some other language, like French>" in the source. English itself is descended, as I recall from old German. It split off from Middle English and left Scots (The lowland language, not the Gaelic of the highlands) still looking and sounding much like Middle English well into modern times. Hell, American English shares a whole bunch of words from Scottish English which don't exist in "standard" English (such as Janitor, Pinkie, and I believe "Proven" is a quirk of "proved" which is specific to these two offshoots). Core English itself is heavily influenced by French, which is descended from Latin. It has, especially for technical things, a huge amount of borrowings from Greek and Latin in and of itself. Again, I can't speak for other European languages as apart from American English I only know some Scots & Irish Gaelic and had a high school education in Spanish from a Castillan, who taught a form of Spanish completely useless in America. But part of what made English a lingua franca was the willingness to take and borrow words from other languages. Why come up with a "Local" word for something when the other language's word will suffice? (I can't find examples of the words or remember how to spell them, but Scottish Gaelic in particular lately has been absorbing "Modern" words like Computer and Internet and applying a Gaelic-sounding inflection and spelling to them. Same word, just ... "Gaelicized") Further, Why name communism "communism", while you can name it "share-property-ism"? ... I'm taking a wild stab here, but the ability for European languages to absorb arbitrary new words that people come up with is part of what has led to such a flexible growth. It's frustrating for new learners to adapt to the language but the flexibility of the written word to introduce new concepts is astounding. Yes, we could have called the Internet "Network-of-connected-computers" but coining a word for it made it somehow more concrete, and real. In a "Hacker" context take an article from yesterday which talked about how Scala is not a better Java. I'm paraphrasing from memory but the author argued that Java's beauty comes from it's simple structure, small list of keywords, etc etc. Scala allows huge flexibility, defining your own keywords, internal DSLs and a lot of things. Java has power in it's rigidity and stricture. Scala is incredibly flexible and adaptable. There are good things about both - but I can make Scala code read like prose (Oh god, I just had reminders of "Literate Programming") because I'm free to define new syntax that fits my needs. _EDIT_: When I say a high school education in Spanish from a Castillan, who taught a form of Spanish completely useless in America. I mean that I at one point had a fairly good knowledge of Spanish. When I moved to Miami after high school (I grew up in Philadelphia - wasn't a lot of exposure to Spanish in the day-to-day at the time), I couldn't understand a word people were saying or vice versa. The syntax, accents, etc were so drastically different from what I was taught that I was lost. I've since more or less let my Spanish knowledge atrophy (I can remember how to conjugate but damned if I can remember much of the actual words/word roots). This itself is actually an argument aside from my previous statements. I don't know much about Chinese but I'm curious as to how locality affects the language. Is syntax and accent so drastically different from one region to another so as to make two people practically unable to communicate? English has cases like that - there are a variety of regional dialects where two native English speakers from distinct regions might swear neither was speaking English. I'm to understand that fragmentation is getting greater since England stopped pushing "Received Pronunciation" (An "official" way to pronounce words taught in schools up through at least WW2). I'm from Mid-Atlantic US which to me seems a fairly "neutral" accent (I have a few quirks of speech specific to my region of birth - I'll often pronounce Water as "wood-er" [whereas in NY where I now live it's "Watt-er] or Creek as "crick"]). But some Southern accents can be practically inscrutable. I won't even begin to go into trying to understand what the hell people from Canada are saying.