And what is with this scourge of position:fixed headers lately? I like to scroll with the space bar or page-down button, and the header always slightly overlaps the top of the new page, preventing me from reading a couple of lines.
It retains only a vestige of Latin's case system (i.e. she vs her) -- in Latin and some modern descendent languages all or most nouns are fair game for this treatment. Polish has 7 noun cases!
It has nearly no inflection in its conjugation, just a past and present tense for most verbs and an extra "s" in the singular third person: I/you/we/they swim/swam, he swims/swam. Contrast this with any of the Romance languages.
It has no grammatical gender, which makes it nearly unique among European languages.
The remaining strikes against it as I see them are:
* The continued presence of articles (a/an/the). The slavic languages get along just fine without them.
* Some irregular and/or inconsistent rules around punctuation, especially apostrophes and semicolons, and some remaining possessive forms (his/hers) -- these are mostly to get around contractions like he's and she's.
* The whole spelling situation is just a mess.
Edit: Bonus points for removing distinctions between (is, in essence) and (is, in a state) and (knows, information) and (knows, familiarity). In many related languages, these are 4 different verbs (In spanish ser, estar, saber, conocer).
On the other hand, I think the irregular spelling has more to do with English never undergoing a mayor spelling reform: many times, the spelling reflects an old pronunciation. From what I know, England always had a relatively lax and pluralistic approach compared to other European countries when it came to managing its language. For example in France you have the Académie française, which essentially has authority over the French language. There is no comparable thing for English, which is probably why such reforms never took place.
Also, correct me if I am wrong, but you seem to incorrectly assume that English (or at least English grammar) stems from Latin.
Fully agree about position:fixed. For long articles I often remove them in the DOM editor. I wish browsers would change page-down distance when there's a fixed header, but I recognize that this is a tricky problem that would have horrible edge cases.
(You speak of the structure of Romance languages...)
I'm also told that this is true of German.
Not quite. We have a bunch of French loanwords that are confusing to spell, some sounds that blend into each other (eu/äu, e/ä, ch/g), we pronounce a 'd' like a 't' at the ent of a wort (so Germans are perpetually confused if it's spelled Standard or Standart), and our markers for whether a vowel is long or short are pretty inconsistent.
Talented English speakers can at least get rid of most ambiguity by themselves, which is something a lot of other languages don't have.
My actual favourite language so far is Swedish. Is it much more raw than English, has less overall ambiguity and has a beautiful ring to it. It is also very easy for a skilled English speaker to pick up and I would recommend it if you are interested in languages. (It also gives you German for free)
That's like saying that learning English gives you French for free. It really helps, but it hardly gives you the entire language for free, just a significant chunk of it.
I too have gotten used to firing up the developer tools and removing position:fixed. The second-most common thing I have to do is set restricted column widths. I get linked to pages that use a print stylesheet, a lot of the time, and just as I restrict the line length in my text editor, I don't want to deal with that in the browser.
I noticed it with regard to clicking anchors with links too, and have been thinking about using some sort of separate span positioned X pixels higher than the real target to compensate.