In reply to:
English has more words...
I thought that the notion that English has more words, by far, than any other language was a generally accepted notion. I've seen it often enough, notably, I believe, in Lincoln Barnett's Treasure of our Tongue. The number of words in the English language is estimated at well above a million, not even counting the arcana of specialized argots and scientific words. To me, what makes English an "advanced language" is the availability of words which have a very precise meaning, which lends clarity and precision when those qualities are wanted, also a large stock of words which can be chosen for beauty of expression. So, although a well-educated person may know 50,000 or more words, he probably does not make use of more than 5,000 max. on a regular basis. The less- and uneducated know and use far fewer, and are more likely to need to resort to grunts and body language to reinforce or interpret what they are saying, which is what you get in other languages with scanty vocabulary.
Your idea that English expresses a wide range of ideas in few words is, IMHO, erroneous. It is true that a sort of Basic English can be taught. During WWII, there were numbers of exiled personnel, including pilots and scholars, from Nazi-occupied countries like Poland, who wanted to offer their services to the Allies, but who spoke no English. The U.S. Army set up a training progrem which included a language school. The language teachers developed and taught this "Basic English" which had a vocablulary of only about 1000 words/expressions (later pared down to about 500), mostly compounds of basic words like come, go, look, give, up, down, so that instead of the students having to learn ascend, arrive, observe, they could use go up, come in, look at, etc.. This worked quite well, and students learned English well enough to function, even if their English often sounded odd and was inelegant. This is the factor which makes English the most popular language in the world: it is relatively easy to learn enough English to communicate. At the same time, English is reckoned to be one of the most difficult languages to master because of the huge number of words and the subtle differences among what seem to be words meaning the same thing; also the huge number of meanings which can never adequately be expressed by a dictionary, but which are in everyday use.
