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You're not wrong, but good luck finding an englishman speaking a foreign language that is not dead. I live some 5km from the french border and their average english is far better than the 2nd language of someone in the uk (not counting immigrants).

English is my second language and, constrained by time, I prefer to put my efforts into german and french because they have good engineering books that are never translated. I can live with sounding like a moron at times when I speak english.

The reason I react at all is that I fear the day when one chinese too many have been mocked and they all say "sod this, we'll use mandarin from now on".

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Forced? By whom? It just turned out that way.

Had we done a little better at the end of the 17th century, you'd all be speaking Dutch - and trust me, you're better off learning English.

As constrained as English is as a language (at least to me), at least it's a decent langua franca that's relatively easy to learn, and works just about everywhere - there's always at least *someone* around who can speak English.

English, broken as it is, is effective. Crude, yes, but effective.

Of course, it doesn't hold a candle to a real language. In its apparent drive for simplification, English has lost a lot of tools to add subtlety into conversation and writing.

And note that I have a degree in English, so I'm not talking out of my ass (at least, a little less than usual).

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What has happened in English, to a degree that people speaking it as a second language may find hard to appreciate, is that almost all formal indicators have been stripped out of the grammar. You do not for example have familiar and distant forms of the second person. You have no formal distinction of cases, very few form differences in tenses. No genders.

But, you have ways of doing what is done in other languages with form, by what I think of as semantic means. You vary the order of words, you pick some synonyms rather than others to express a thought.

The result is, its very easy to make yourself understood in English at some level. But its very hard to speak with the flexibility and nuance of an educated native speaker.

If you want to see a classic example of this sort of thing at work, read Auden's poem Musee des Beaux Arts. Or the opening paragraphs of Conrad's Secret Sharer. Or in a context of entertainment, the conversations in Yes Minister. The particular quality of English is to have this second meaning entwined with the first, in a way that is grammatically and as a matter of form indistinguishable from a passage in which it was absent.

Here is a small example. A young man had an anti social behaviour order imposed on him, forbidding sarcasm. Yes, this really did happen. He was accused of having breached the order. To which he replied that on the occasion in question he had not been sarcastic but ironic.

Dutch has a quite a lot of this, but it still relies on grammar for meaning. As when for example we differentiate between a large sized man and a great man by using the ame adjective in a grammatically incorrect way in one of the cases. English however seems to me to have more or less replaced grammar by meaning. It is almost as if you can only construe a sentence once you have understood it. Until you do there are an absolutely huge number of possible grammatical construals any given sentence will support.

One interesting way to look at it is take a simple sentence - the cat sat on the mat, for instance. Then ask yourself how many choices you have made on the way to putting it together. In articles, for instance, in English you have one. In French two, it could be le or la. In German...well, not only are there three genders, there are also the cases....

You always find when you do this that in constructing an English sentence you have the smallest number in any language of choices of form. But you will also generally find if you go in reverse, that you have the largest number of possible interpretations of a sentence which may not appear in the least ambiguous at first glance.

It is quite common, if one lives as a foreigner in Holland and speaks Dutch, to hear other Dutch speaking foreigners reproached with still making mistakes in the language. And they do. What the Dutch however do not realize is that they too are making mistakes in English, but they are not formal ones, and are consequently almost invisible. Its not that you make a grammatical error and so it jars, as it does in Dutch. Nor is is, as in German, that you end up meaning something different. It is rather that it is perfectly grammatical but sounds not quite English, and you don't get an implication across.

It is a good language for technicalities however, since this is a distinct subset, and it does very well in simply getting a literal meaning across no matter how clumsily expressed.

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I didn't really understand all the rules and syntactic tricks that went into English grammar until I tried to learn French. I would not be surprised if something similar was at work there.

At the very least, the fractured internet text-speak produced by native English speakers leads me to suspect they don't know much about sentence construction.

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