I've been told Old English is the Lord's language (and thus also Perfect) because that's what the KJV of the Bible was written in!
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.
I read once that 100 years ago Japanese and Chinese tried to get rid of their characters because they thought this may have been holding them back socially and developmentally, but the problem was they can read information just sooo much faster using them, without them they read comparably slower and so they had to keep them.
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.
I read there's a group of people in south E Africa that speak tonally + still use clicking noses, presumably a remnant from before we evolved vocal cords!
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.
Are some languages more evolved than others?
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.
Is it possible to ask the question: Which is the BEST language and objectively answer it? Why do people think it's wrong to ask?
Surely because it would be politically incorrect.
Perhaps Chinese can impart information the fastest.
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!
I have heard that in Belgium (and other multilingual countries) it is relatively common practice for people to have a conversation between 2 people that are speaking two different languages, i.e, each speaks their native tongue which the other understands but is not as competent at speaking.
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.
In Indonesian, unlike in some other languages, there is no tenses, no singular/plural rule, no article (like the, a, an), to mention few.
Chinese has none of these Stone Age leftovers either. It also doesn't have prepositions. All relationships are expressed using nouns and verbs.
English: 510 million speakers; Mandarin: 1120 million speakers
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.
