Is there a "best" language?

The King James translation of the Bible was in fact published in 1611, contemporary with Shakespeare. This is Modern English, the form of our language after the Great Vowel Shift that was complete in the mid-16th century. (E.g., long A changed from the cardinal A of Middle English--as in Spanish padre--to today's Modern English sound, closer to cardinal E). To be precise, we call this Early Modern English, but the transition to true Modern English was only a few decades off. We have no trouble reading Early Modern English, although we Americans might find it difficult to understand a native speaker, who linguists say sounded like what the British now call "lower class" dialect.

Old English (now usually called Anglo-Saxon) was the synthesis of Old German dialects brought over by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes when the Romans abandoned Britannia in the 5th century. It is the language in which "Beowulf" is written, with its elaborate inflections and pure proto-Germanic vocabulary, syntax and phonetics, and none of us could understand it without study. It persisted until roughly a hundred years after the Norman Invasion in 1066.

That's the boundary with Middle English, the result of the massive overlay of the Norman French occupiers. The grammar was vastly simplified, some of the German phonetic harshness was replaced by a bit of French softness, and thousands of French words were assimilated.

By the mid-1500s the conquerors and the conquered had merged into one people, English had replaced French as the language of government and academia with the concomitant development of a vocabulary and more-or-less standard orthography to serve those disciplines, and the Great Vowel Shift marked the transition to Modern English.

It's been suggested quite recently that Chinese can actually read Chinese characters faster than we can read English in the Roman alphabet. But the real problem with a transition to phonetic writing in Chinese is that Chinese is not a single language. Mandarin and Cantonese, the two most widespread Chinese languages, use more-or-less the same words in more-or-less the same order, because of centuries of the leveling force of a common written language, but their pronunciation is vastly different and there is no convenient mapping from one to the other. For example, "five" is wu in Mandarin and ng in Cantonese. There is no way to write Chinese phonetically that would be understandable to all Chinese. This far surpasses the problem in English. The English of Dallas, Yorkshire and Mumbai are merely different dialects of the same language; The "Chinese" of Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai are three different languages.

No, we've had vocal cords for millions of years. Dogs have vocal cords. All non-African languages are arguably descended from a single African language that was brought out by the one tribe who began the Homo sapiens diaspora 50,000 years ago, and it happened to develop in a way that lost those sounds.

It's been suggested that those phonemes would have been used by hunters, naturally occurring sounds that would not betray their presence to their prey. They're clearly somewhat difficult to form even for someone who learns them in infancy, so as our need for them abated we abandoned them. There is a powerful force to level phonetics. Look at all the languages which have only the five cardinal vowels, or the rarity of the English TH and Russian KH phonemes.

It's tempting to say that the languages of the few remaining premodern tribes are "less advanced" than ours, but they serve the needs of their speakers. That's all any language can do. I'd suggest that the true measure of the modernity of a language is its ability to adapt to the changing environment of its speakers. By that measure, all languages satisfy the criterion. Some, like English, undergo a combination of a huge breakdown plus the wholesale borrowing of foreign words. Others, like Chinese, use their own syntactic flexibility and word-building facility to do it all from within.

Surely because it would be politically incorrect.

That's my own opinion. Based upon my own observation I'd say that it takes an average of seven syllables to express what takes ten in English (and probably twenty in Italian or Japanese). However, Chinese speakers don't use this advantage to speak quickly. They actually speak more slowly and achieve about the same information transfer rate as we do. As a result the language is easier for foreigners and students to follow, as opposed to other languages in which it's difficult to tell where one word ends and the next begins. What a boon for a civilization that constantly brings together non-native speakers!

That's actually just the opposite of what's recommended. Each person should speak the language in which he's least fluent because with the slow speed and limited vocabulary, the other will be sure to understand it.

Chinese has none of these Stone Age leftovers either. It also doesn't have prepositions. All relationships are expressed using nouns and verbs.

This statistic does not accurately count India. All Indians except the most poorly educated speak English. They have to, because there is no single "native language of India." The closest any Indic language comes to that status is Hindi, and for political and cultural reasons it cannot be accepted as the nation's lingua franca. Indians speak English among themselves, which gives rise to the acknowledged dialect of Indian English. If only half of India's 1.1 billion people are counted as English speakers, which I think is a conservative estimate, that boosts English very close to Mandarin in the statistics.

 

That's a remarkable statement to make on the Linguistics board. English is hamstrung by a pitiful set of prepositions leftover from the Stone Age, with which we're supposed to express every conceivable relationship. Traditionally we circumvent that problem by creating new words from Latin and Greek roots... which everyone must then learn. We've recently begun struggling to get around that limitation by inventing strange new constructions like "cable-ready" and "fuel-efficient." Chinese has a much richer facility for expressing the nuances of relationships and is much more readily adaptable to new technologies and other advances in business or culture.

English has abitrary syntax rules that serve no purpose except to confuse foreigners. What's the difference between arriving at your destination "on time" and "in time?" What's the difference between "the air," "an air," and just plain "air?" Why do Americans say "in school" like the British, but we don't say "in hospital?"

People make fun of Chinese phonetics, but English phonetics is just as difficult for foreigners. And you can just about make the same criticism of our so-called "phonetic" writing system.

I'm a native American, although not British, and I'm generally not regarded as "dense." I much prefer Chinese.

 

You're focusing too much on the written language. That can be changed. Korean and Vietnamese both gave up their Chinese characters and adopted phonetic alphabets. Many of the major European languages underwent orthographic reform in the 19th century, with of course the glaring exceptions of English and French, which need it the worst.

It's the language itself, its grammar, syntax, phonetics, word-building facility, etc., that are the keys to being "practical."

I love Esperanto but it is SUCH a 19th-century relic. It has a suffix for nouns to make them feminine, but none for masculine! They're just assumed to be masculine, even occupations that were traditionally female such as "nurse." As for the pronouns, Zamenhof spoke Yiddish, German, English, Russian and Polish, and I think he was also fluent in Latin and ancient Greek, since he translated the Bible. They all have three genders so it was a paradigm he never questioned. (He also knew Hebrew but I'm not familiar with its handling of gender.) He was just as bad with other paradigms. Verbs have infinitive, present, past, future and conditional, as well as a rather silly array of present, past and future active and passive participles. Nouns and pronouns have an accusative case, and adjectives have to agree with their nouns in gender and number. He thought he was building a language with a simplified grammar, but that was only by the standards of Latin and Polish!

If he had bothered to study Chinese he might have had the revelation to reduce the number of parts of speech, in addition to doing away with all inflections, even plural. Now that would be some language. I'm always singing the praises of Chinese, but it has a prodigious array of micro-rules that only apply to small groups of words. E.g., numbers have to be followed by a "measure word" that differs depending on the category of noun. "Large flat objects" have their own special measure word.

 

English is a more efficient language phonetically. It takes about ten syllables in English to say what takes fifteen or twenty syllables in Italian. So we speak more slowly. Chinese is even more efficient, with about seven syllables. As a result it is spoken even more slowly than English. That takes care of the "lazy" part.

As for the "flat" part, that's a matter of dialect. Standard American English doesn't have a lot of dynamic range (tone, volume, etc.), so it would sound "flat," compared to Standard Italian, which tends to have more. I think Sicilian Italian is even more dynamic.

RP ("Received Pronunciation" or what we call Oxford English or BBC English) is both a lot faster and a lot more dynamic than American, but it can hardly match Italian. For that you'd need something like Japanese or Russian. Southern American English is even slower than Standard but it may have a little more dynamics.

Chinese may be "lazier" than English but it makes Italian sound "flat" because tones are phonemic so it has a lot of tonal dynamics.