IS ENGLISH DIFFICULT?.

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 126, 24 November 1923, Page 16

IS ENGLISH DIFFICULT?.

ITS SPELLING ONLY BAR TO BEING WORLD LANGUAGE.

It is astonishing how common is the belief that English is a difficult language, writes Frank Jones in the "Daily Chronicle." Over and over again I have been assured by people who have not even a nodding acquaintance with any other language that it is the most difficult the world has. ever known. I gup. pose it v the result of the Englishman^ fatal fondness for a paradox. And vet when we_ come to detail English has many claims to the title of the. world's easiest language. In one respect it stands practically alone, ' and that is in its natural gender. That all males should be masculine, all females feminine, and all things without life neuter would appear at first sight the most natural thing m the- world. And yet in English alone of the great languages of the world does this hold good- Moreover, iinglish has no useless genders. In most languages adjectives are quite uselessly mllected for gender; in Russian even the verbs.. Another point on which English scores is the simplicity of its verbal system. To write out all the forms of a Latm-=verb would take possibly twenty minutes, a Greek verb longer still. In English the only forms of the verb to love" are love, loves, loved, loving, and lovest. Similarly with nouns. Latin has six cases, Russian six, modern English but two. One of the most persistent arguments of those who find difficulty in English is that in many cases 2- t Wol', <L has 6everal different meanings, rhe difficulty of the Frenchman with the word 'box" has been made the subject of a comic recitation. The ambiguity of the journalistic headline during the war "The Stocking of Private Parks cannot be denied. But many other^ languages are worse than English in this respect. The one respect English is perhaps the most difficult language in the world is'in its spelling. But for this it would have no competitor in the race for the position-of the world language.