Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
English has other quirks like a fixed adjective order, mysterious plurals, was/were, a/an, I/me, -ix or -ess for female version of title or occupation, rules for when a possessive takes or doesn't an apostrophe, with exceptions. Words that over the years take hyphens and become compound and why some will always have a hyphen. Hyphen usage when adding like for comparison.
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Standard English has relatively few grammatical quirks compared to some other languages (perhaps even many others). I think that's one of the reasons it is so widespread (aside from historical reasons, of course - British Empire and its colonies etc). It's not a difficult language to learn. For example, I started Russian at school when I was 8 and English when I was 12; we had 2 or 3 times as many Russian language lessons as we had English ones. And still I knew English better than Russian when I finished high school. English was just much simpler to learn.