Unlike many other languages, English has grown because it's adaptable. It has almost as many borrowed words for advanced concepts as "native" words. It's hard to even distinguish anymore.
If anything, a solid counter argument can be made that Romance languages (descended from Latin) lack the flexibility of English and other Germanic languages.
Non primary English speakers frequently complain that English is more complicated than other languages. This is true. I'm a native speaker and only can read limited Spanish. Where I get hung up is the dependence on gender of objects. Similar experience with Japanese when I was studying that a few years ago.
I completely believe that primary language has a physical effect on the brain in terms of neural structure. It must have.
But since English is so adaptable, if there's a concept that is better expressed in another language we tend to adopt the words of other languages to express it.
However other languages seem to be less adaptable. For example, France has or had an official government ministry for decades to manage new foreign words entering the French language. To this day, there are newish specific French words for technologies coming from English speaking countries.
Another good example is some YouTube videos from India I've run across. (I turn on subtitles). But say the speaker is talking in Hindi. Many times more technical terms are English words or phrases that are freely interspersed with Hindi. They're borrowing the English words, with a bit of a Hindi dialect hitting the pronunciation.
Going back to Japanese, we see the same thing. I don't know if the JP gov has a language ministry.
But if you look at written Japanese text you definitely see that most numerology is written with western/English 0-9 characters mixed with katakana or hiragana. When you hear people speaking, and once your ear is oriented towards Japanese sounds, you can start to pick up on the adopted English words that are said with a native dialect emphasis.
> However other languages seem to be less adaptable. For example, France has or had an official government ministry for decades to manage new foreign words entering the French language. To this day, there are newish specific French words for technologies coming from English speaking countries.
It's not because French is not adaptable, it's because France wants to maintain the language as "pure".
They have the same in Quebec.
When a new word appears, they consider that there should be an equivalent in French instead of just using the original word. Yes, they are mainly doing this for English (there are no French word for tsunami or iceberg) because they assume that French will slowly disappear if they don't protect it.
Language imports are a poor substitute for grammatical flexibility. That's why French, for example, has limited need to import words directly: it can recreate the same meaning with native words. German is another great example, its grammar provides a lot of the flexibility that was lost in English. It is almost impossible to translate German philosophy into English without losing the natural flavor of word combinations that make German so adaptable.
If anything, a solid counter argument can be made that Romance languages (descended from Latin) lack the flexibility of English and other Germanic languages.
Non primary English speakers frequently complain that English is more complicated than other languages. This is true. I'm a native speaker and only can read limited Spanish. Where I get hung up is the dependence on gender of objects. Similar experience with Japanese when I was studying that a few years ago.
I completely believe that primary language has a physical effect on the brain in terms of neural structure. It must have.
But since English is so adaptable, if there's a concept that is better expressed in another language we tend to adopt the words of other languages to express it.
However other languages seem to be less adaptable. For example, France has or had an official government ministry for decades to manage new foreign words entering the French language. To this day, there are newish specific French words for technologies coming from English speaking countries.
Another good example is some YouTube videos from India I've run across. (I turn on subtitles). But say the speaker is talking in Hindi. Many times more technical terms are English words or phrases that are freely interspersed with Hindi. They're borrowing the English words, with a bit of a Hindi dialect hitting the pronunciation.
Going back to Japanese, we see the same thing. I don't know if the JP gov has a language ministry.
But if you look at written Japanese text you definitely see that most numerology is written with western/English 0-9 characters mixed with katakana or hiragana. When you hear people speaking, and once your ear is oriented towards Japanese sounds, you can start to pick up on the adopted English words that are said with a native dialect emphasis.