IS ENGLISH DIFFICULT?

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLIII, Issue XLIII, 31 December 1923, Page 3

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 DailyChronicle. Over and over again I have been assured by people who have not even a notlding acquaintance with anyother language that it is the most difficult the world has ever known. I suppose it is the result of the English-. man's fatal fondness for a paradox. And yet 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 in the world. And yet in English alone of the great languages of the world does this hold good., Moreover English has no useless genders. In most languages adjectives are quite uselessly inflected for gender; in Eussia even the verbs. Another point |on which English scores is the sim- : plicity of its verbal system. To write I out all the forms of a Latin verb would | take possibly twenty minutes, a Greek i verb longer still. In English the only forms of the verb "to love" are love, loves, loved, loving and lovest. Simi- ; larly with nouns. Latin has six cases, 1 Eussian six, modern English but two. One of the most persistent arguments of those who find difficulty in English 13 that in many cases a word has sev- . eral different meanings. The 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 in which English is perhaps the most difficult lan- • guage in the world is in its spelling, j But for this it would have no comi petitor in the race for the position of the world language.