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> Maybe if English started to incorporate words and grammar from all languages around the world, it could become a language of languages, but I suspect that lan

> Maybe if English started to incorporate words and grammar from all languages around the world, it could become a language of languages, but I suspect that languages needs rules forbidding some constructs to be language that allow express things. Incorporating all possible rules probably would make any word combination to be allowed and language might lose its purpose. English borrows words promiscuously from other languages. Many were borrowed from French after the Norman conquest. Many were borrowed from Latin and Greek by scholars. In fact there's a list of lists here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_English_words_by_country_or_language_of_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_English_words_by_coun... All the loanwords in English is one reason why its orthography (spelling) is so difficult.

pessimizer 7y ago
The worst thing (more exaggerated in American English) is that English speakers attempt to both pronounce and conjugate those borrowed words as they are in the source language. Part of that is obviously the Germanic roots, where there aren't any regular conjugations, and plenty of the conjugations are arbitrary infixes - but listen to an English person say "valet" or "herb," or worse, the horror of "Nicaragua" and it's obvious that Americans do this more.