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I am a globetrotter and now in France working at a tertiary institution. I learnt french only for a few months, when I was younger (elementary school) as it was one of the compulsory languages to learn. Overtime, I lost it. On getting here, I tried to pick it up but was very intimidated. To add insult to injury, they don't want to hear me speak the phonetic/queen's English Lang. It is even not understood by them; hence, I speak the basics (most times grammatically wrong). They tend to speak English but the conveyed message is often confusing let alone torturing to me. I often cry and on many occasions, I think there is a systemic racial profiling going on here given that I am dark skin. I appreciate them picking an additional language and improving their skills via me, yet I am intimidated by not allowing me speak their language but must communicate in English. The whole experience seemed to be a new-age skills transfer - French<-English. They are using folks from the 2nd/3rd world as the 1st world folks cannot stand the harassment - they would have left the job.

An interesting observation is that my thinking changes as I learn/improve on the French Lang. I sometimes think the English folks could have been more picky all the while i.e. the systemic racism is higher with them. I tend to see the culture in French - love/friendship even I have my reservations (history has shown that they could be dangerous - colonialism). I see the hidden traits in French (Lang.), which is fearlessness/aggressiveness and English,\ (Lang.) which is respectfulness with a possibility of deception in it.

Ciao. I'm a student of Italian philology, and I do find your comment interesting for obvious reasons. I also speak English very fluently.

I find English to be a dumbed down language, and reading long and complex sentences in it gives me unbearable pain, with about every grammatical function contained in different words spread all over the sentence, and little to no clue for what's linked with what. I never read literature in English because it is incomprehensible (even tho I easily read technical stuff in it). And I can't stand English pronunciation.

Italian on the other hand offers nice possibilities for prefixes and suffixed that modify a word's meaning, allowing for deriving new words rather easily. The noun-gender system and verb conjugation allows for more complex sentences to be built more fluently and pleasingly, without compromising legibility. Vowels are actual vowels. Italian has a small set of simple and nice sounds, whereas English has upwards of 40 different sounds you need to learn in order to speak near-native. And Italian sounds just cool and lovely.

I don't know how you can think that English is more flexible and more expressive. All that makes English feasible is the fact that it's spoken in the US.

English is the Microsoft of languages. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Part of the insanity of English grammar and spelling is that it's a weird polyglot mashup of Old English/Frisian, Norse, French, Latin, Greek, and then whatever random bits of a hundred other languages. This flexibility is also a strength, in comparison to more ossified and standardized languages. To borrow another software analogy, English is the bazaar.

On a completely different front, gendering sexless nouns is just silly, as an English-native speaker. At least German mostly puts things that don't have an actual gender as neuter.

The one argument I'm aware of about grammatical gender is that found in the prologue of the second edition (1858) of the work titled De l'origine du langue of Ernest Renan, which holds that it may have originated in what I'll call sexual dialects, which diverge because of little intersexual social contact, and words most used by females become feminine, and those most used by males become masculine. He cites that in Indian dramas men speak Sanskrit and female Femprakrit, though I couldn't find anything about the latter. He also writes, little before this, that the older the language, the more apparent the grammatical gender, because of the instinct of ancient peoples to attach sexual identity to even the inanimate. The more modern the language, the lesser the effect of grammatical gender. He cites indeed English for being the most simplified in this respect.

Grammatical gender is not merely about masculinity or femminility of words. For example, "giornata" is a femminine italian word meaning "the part of the day from morning to the evening", derived from "giorno", a masculine word which means "daytime, (whole) day (i.e. 24 hours). This is a feature of femminine past participle, which carries the meaning of quickness, something that happens at a certain time, a hit (testata: headbutt) etc.

As you say, English is a dumbed-down language which is exactly why it has become the language of science and not any of the inflected languages such as German (which used to be, certainly the language of chemistry), Italian or Spanish etc., In English, prepositions and auxiliary verbs make explicit the ideas in a statement. This is not an especial advantage in literary works but in terms of precise communication it's a winner. For a detailed discussion I recommend 'The language of science from the fall of Latin to the rise of English - Scientific Babel' by Michael D. Gordin.

As for very great literature, the English have Shakespeare (sadly unread by you) but you have Dante (sadly unread by me). I mean in the original!

> That being said, I do consider contemporary English to be technically superior to Italian in almost all respects. It's easier, more flexible, more expressive, more concise, and more complete. The only exception would be its utter, inexcusable, almost criminal, irregular spelling.

For German I consider it exactly the other way round. German is much more exact: Long compound substantives are very easy to express in German but difficult in English (in this sense I consider German as more expressive and concise). The grammar in German might be ugly and unforgiving (it really could be simplified - just my opinion) but makes it much more complicated to express sentences that can be misunderstood. English might be easy to learn at the beginning, but becoming really good in English takes a horrible amount of time. For example it is in my opinion much easier to become good in French than in English. Additionally there is no really "standard English" as there is in French or in German (Hochdeutsch). What is actually the authoritative ressource for English to clear up what spelling, punctuation etc. really is the correct one?

The correct one is whichever works best at the time. In English it is, or use to be, common to use different registers for different occasions.

How can one even say then that a spelling a punctuation is wrong in English if there is no authoritative ressource with which one can answer the question?

as long as you are consistent, it really doesn't matter. Even in academic or technical writing (i am in Australia), you can use american spellings or british spellings and noone really cares. Perhaps you have to let go of the "one true way" of spelling/grammar, if things seem to work fine without it.

I rather think about school: How can teachers even mark wrong spelling if there is no standardized spelling? The same holds for punctuation of course, for which up to now I really could not find any ressource with authoritative character where to put commas in the English language.

There are specific guides within certain contexts. An educational setting may use the Meriam-Webster dictionary as the definitive for spelling, and the English textbook as the definitive for punctuation. Outside of specific contexts, there is no absolutely correct way of doing things.

The metric is "Did the message get passed, and did I not sound like an idiot?"

There are many authoritative resources. Pick a dictionary or thesaurus or a grammar guide from the version of English you want to learn and use that as your reference.

When I say a version of English I mean British English or American English or Canadian English or Australian English or some other version of English. They all have differences in spelling (colour vs color etc) and differences in phrases and idioms.

English is so varied because it has travelled all over the world and changed in so many ways as a result - hence the forementioned varieties of English. For better or worse, it has become the international language of science, technology, business, and entertainment. In our internet age, that means it changes even more rapidly than other languages that don't have such global reach.

There's pretty wide agreement among textbooks and style manuals for English spelling and punctuation. They do differ a bit at the edge cases, but particularly when it comes to spelling people are going to assume you're uneducated if you go your own way.

It's as if you are describing the differences between Java and Scheme :)

There is no authoritative source for English grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Common usage decides what is correct, essentially. Organizations or groups may decide to use certain style guides, for example, the APA style guide or the Chicago Manual of Style.

English grammar and spelling are like manners and customs. There is no single "right" way to be polite but there are things that are commonly accepted by most people to be impolite and therefore "wrong." It can be hard and confusing. I have a phd in the humanities and I still find myself questioning my grammar or struggling to explain why something a student wrote in a paper is wrong. (I usually fall back on things like "this is unclear" and "it would be more elegant to write something like this..." But like manners or even music, once you have internalized the "rules" you know when you can break them and when you can't.

Would it be better to have a single official standard English? Maybe but good luck getting all the English-speaking countries to agree on that.

We'll never give up our non-standard and confusing spelling. It's part of the charm of the language.