Comments by "" (@jmitterii2) on "A brief history of plural word...s - John McWhorter" video.

  1. Only thing difficult in English is our spelling compared to other languages. French is probably the most difficult though. I'm unaware of most Slavic/Greek rooted and Asian rooted languages on their spelling though. Just comparing western European languages.
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  2. English has most vocabulary in Romantic languages: French and Latin. While the grammar is still very Germanic. And we still have many lexicon and archaic words that we occasional use and even when we don't, we can make sense of the archaic words and lexicon when we do hear it. English was originally a Germanic language, the grammar is still closer to Germanic languages like Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and a little distant German, because German never grew up out of its 3 the's LOL! And its insane compound words scheme, and funky transitive/dative contractions. I like German, but it's a pain to learn and speak fluently; like English there's several accents and dialects throughout the German speaking countries. They even have difficulty speaking their own language to their standard German.
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  3. Times exist that we don't. Like that last sentence. Computers are great, and adding an s to that implies all computers (many) more than one. I like our pluralizing of words. Again, no numbers were mentioned. But adding the s implies more than one. When using singular, might confuse I like playing game for some specific game, or games in general? Which one? And if you had talked about a game prior, single may imply that last game, when you meant games in general. I like single and plural denotation in our languages of at least Romantic and Germanic languages. Sounds uncivilized without that denotation. Like native speakers of Slavic languages are not accustom to separate articles that lead the noun, yes I'm very much talking to you Russian native speaker slash English not native speakers. "All you need is coffee pot. Take money to bank, and we buy house someday, okay." Barbaric way of speaking English, or any language that has articles leading the noun. Bad! bad! bad! I looked a little on how Slavic grammar works... Its tough. So I can't blame them too much. But I can insist they keep practicing, or just keep sounding like Ug Fug the cave man. Up to them.
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