You're mistaken about natural language paths. English does not have any governing body like the Royal Academy of Language. The language changes because people adopt or adapt new words. I'm not asserting that a "natural evolution" of language is preferable to other approaches, but rather that there isn't an alternative for American English. English has a tradition of transforming itself through the common usage, which is itself informed by many other factors. You don't have to like it, but there is no top-down structure that can be enforced on English users. It's been tried, and thoroughly rejected in practice.

English is an open source language. Maybe even free. Many other languages (French and Mandarin, fer shure, I don't know about others) are proprietary. Sure, there are English forks but they're pretty much all binary compatible.

This is the year of English on the desktop.

English, as a language, is horrible really; most 'native' speakers are unable to speak it correctly and most would certainly get the grammar wrong in its written form. Just look at the "your" and "you're" confusion which is common for example. Not to mention the two ways you can say 'the' depending on the content of the surrounding words.

The vast, vast majority of native English speakers definitely understand the difference between "your" and "you're." This isn't confusion. It's just an easy typo to make.

If anything, if there is genuine confusion, then it's confusion over spelling, not the actual grammar of the spoken language.

[color="#1C2837"]"That said, the conversation was about which language was 'better'"

[color="#1C2837"]Wasn't it just a post to see if anyone would get offended at the question? I thought the OP explained that originally?

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[color="#1C2837"]I have no basis to say whether English is superior or not.[/quote]

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[color="#1C2837"]Well, that'd make your answer honest. I wouldn't have pretended more than that. [color="#1C2837"]The question is ... trolling on purpose.[/quote]

[color="#1C2837"]Honestly I was a little shocked when it went on.

[color="#1C2837"]Last I checked, any child can pick up English or Spanish with ease and use them to communicate all the same things a counterpart with the other language could communicate. Frankly anything more is either a "my culture sucks" disposition or "other cultures suck" disposition, both of which usually stem from ignorance.

[color="#1C2837"]Spanish evolved too, it has dialects, dead words, dictionaries full of words that do not matter in contemporary spanish, words that only matter in a certain region but all have to be in there anyway, borrowings, made-up words, ...

[color="#1C2837"]I'm not aware of a language in use anywhere that isn't subject to these realities.

[color="#1C2837"]So now superfluousness comes up and why don't we have a word that means this or that...

[color="#1C2837"]I'll give an example of something redundant in English; conjugation of the to be verb.

[color="#1C2837"]Why do we have to say "I am", "You are", "you're all"? This is redundant. No wannabe language nazi will go down this route but it is redundant and some English speakers drop the conjugation ("I be", "you be", "y'all be") with no ill consequences in terms of expressiveness. [color="#1C2837"]Another route is to communicate the subject through the conjugation as Polish does ("Jestem", "Jeste?", "Jeste?cie").

[color="#1C2837"]But then one might realize every example there has roughly the same number of phonemes so honestly now what's the practical difference?

[color="#1C2837"]And of course I've heard Poles complain it's stupid that the "instrumental" case goes with the "to be" verb ("jestem programist?"), and that perception doesn't make any sense either.

[color="#1C2837"]And guess what? They fuck up a lot too. And they have their "wrong" dialects too.

[color="#1C2837"]While I'm at it, double negatives are not intrinsically wrong either and reflect a difference in the way a language is treating relationships between words. Some languages have double negatives in the standard, valid, ivory-tower spec.

[color="#1C2837"]No language makes perfect sense according to some twit's completely arbitrary specifications. Two persons' languages are valid according to each other when they can agree on what is being communicated. Asking for more is like asking a dog not to sniff another's rear; it's not going to happen and it's just vanity anyway.