re: #367 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

My English students in Germany go nuts over the way that English has several words for the same thing: a Punkt in German can be a period, dot or point depending on how it is used, while we have other words that have several unrelated meanings, like “fine”.

German, for all its clunkiness and grammar rules and endings, is a highly logical language without a lot of overlapping or multiple meanings compared to English.

Most languages don’t borrow a new word for every little nuance of meaning, the way English does. as Mark Twain said:

…ours is a mongrel language which started with a child’s vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smouched from every unwatched language under the sun, the spelling of each individual word of the lot locating the source of the theft and preserving the memory of the revered crime.