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Path: utzoo!watmath!watnot!watmum!tjsmedley
From: tjsmedley@watmum.UUCP (Trevor J. Smedley)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Easy languages
Message-ID: <402@watmum.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 12-Feb-86 12:16:21 EST
Article-I.D.: watmum.402
Posted: Wed Feb 12 12:16:21 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 13-Feb-86 00:41:36 EST
References: <77@druhi.UUCP> <3550004@csd2.UUCP>
Reply-To: tjsmedley@watmum.UUCP (Trevor J. Smedley)
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 30
Summary: 

>>As for spoken language, it has been proven that English is the easiest
>>language because all other languages are derived from it.
                   ^^^
>	Also most European Languages are derived from English and have
>a large number of words from common roots.

All other languages? Most European languages?

"All other languages" is simply false. Chinese, Russian, Finnish and
Hungarian certainly are not derived from English.

As for "Most European languages", I am no expert, but I was under the
impression that there were no languages *derived* from English, except,
perhaps, Esperanto to a certain extent. I would find it very hard to
believe that any one of German, French or Italian was derived from
English. They all have some roots in common, but to say that any one
is derived from any other seems rather unlikely.

In any case, this would not be an argument for English being the
easiest language. Using this argument, you would have to say that
Latin is easier than Italian, or that Icelandic is the easiest of the
Scandinavian languages, and I doubt that anyone would agree with that.

If you said that English was easy for many people because it takes
things from a wide variety of languages and language types, well, I
might agree with that.

Trevor J. Smedley                    University of Waterloo

{decvax,allegra,ihnp4,utzoo}!watmum!tjsmedley