Two posts to the one thread - whoa, the Jazz police will be after me!
While I agree with Faldage's facts and figures, he hasn't actually provided an explanation of
why English is so easy for foreigners to make themselves understood in with a relatively low level of vocabulary and syntax.
The reason is, I think, that incorrect word order will generally sound wrong but, because of our lack of semantically-important word endings, will be understandable.
I had to sit through a presentation by a fellow from Myanmar in November whose grasp of English word order was pretty damned tenuous (in fact, I think I learned something about Burmese language word order), yet I understood what he was on about. And that's not the first example of the phenomenon.
Are there any other languages (which we know of amongst us) which allow this kind of indiscriminate jumbling up of words without losing the basic meaning?
