So true!
> and english is bad at expressing these nuances.
I think English is a terrible shitpile of grammar and syntax. I'm very impressed that anyone who speaks another language natively can get good at it.
But I'm interested in the notion that it lacks nuance to describe the intricacies of text rendering. Can someone tell me where that would apply?
From my completely anecdotal observations, native speakers are the worst at English. They struggle with homophones, prepositions, tenses, confuse meanings of words, apostrophes and I could go on and on.
English grammar is easier to learn by reading and writing than speaking, what most native speakers do.
Its/it's, they/their/they're, who's/whose, prepositions like a lot, a while and confused words like definitely and defiantly are the first that come to mind. See if you are better than a foreigner.
You don't say "You give I the apple.", but "You give me the apple." (similar for he, she, we, they), i.e. the pronoun is inflected depending on whether it is subject or object, so English speakers are perfectly aware on the difference between subject and object.
When you refer to the subject, you use "who" and when you refer to the object, you use "whom".
Spoken languages are like programming languages, there are the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.
For example, goose/geese is the result of the plural form and singular form undergoing different paths in the Great Vowel Shift resulting in the different vowels in the modern form.
There's also evidence that Proto-Indo-European had laryngeal consonants that have disappeared in all modern languages derived from it [1], but have left their mark on the descendant languages.
Eg. receipt, which has the p only in Latin, but had long lost it by the time Old French brought it to Britain.
English will always have my respect for being open/inclusive and adaptive.
Interesting fact: If you are looking for a spoken language with the cleanest/composable grammar - it's Sanskrit. The panini grammar is actually like a programming language where sentences are just compositions of lower level similar units.
But like I said it's practically dead (not used as a spoken language). But interestingly used as a proxy language for translation and other nlp tasks due to it's clean grammar :)
I took this to mean that any non-domain-specific language may be bad at describing that domain, e.g. why physicists, mathematicians, chemists, etc. have a common symbology for the discipline, or why programming languages exist. i.e., not so much that English is uniquely bad among written human language for conveying these topics, but just that any non-specialized language may be.
Though, I think the author did a fair job, but I lack the domain experience to guess at where the misconceptions might lie.
Bantu languages, which cover much of subsaharan Africa, have many noun classes ("genders")—sometimes as many as 20. You have to learn all sorts of prefixes for each noun class depending on their grammatical role in tying to the noun.
However, it's really not so bad. Once you get the hang of the noun classes, it actually makes picking up the ear for it faster. Of course this is more true the more consistent the language in applying its internal rules.