Language is used for two purposes: communication and
esthetic pleasure. For either of these cathegories it is impossible to come
up with a set charachteristics that would make a language better than any
other.
Someone claimed that the lack of grammatical complexities,for example, is an
advantage for the english langage. I am italian and i do not agree. In fact
I find it confusing when someone says that he is going to bring a friend and
i do not know whether it is a man or a woman, moreover i'm used to express
myself not only through vocabulary, but also through the syntax of a
sentence, english, on the other side, prefers short sentences with not much
subordination. What i want to say is that it is impossible to judge a
language and its capabilities from its grammar or vocabulary, especially
when one is comparing his native language to foreign languages. The
grammatical simplicity of english is itself relative, to a chinese person,
used to not declinating verbs in tenses and modes, english is grammatically
terribly complex
james k