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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> It's also one of the reasons that English is so versatile. It's
> assimilated nifty words from every language it's come into contact
> with.

Many languages have few root words, most languages probably.  Of those it is 
said that they tax the ingenuity.  Of English it is said, it taxes the memory.

Our linguistic mindset is semantic, we want a new word for every concept, so 
we end up with over 100,000 of them. The result has been that we have lost 
our 
insight as to how our language operates.  Did you ever see, for example, that 
the words 'hat' and 'head' are closely related ('t' is the exact same sound 
as 'd' without the voicing and are linguistically interchangeable).  Or did 
you 
ever notice the large number of words we have with similar meanings, the one 
with 'sh' and the other with 'sk'
shirt - skirt, skiff - ship, shoot - scoot?  When you hear the place where 
Robin Hood lived, does the meaning stand out to you as 'Wood Cutters' 
Forest'?  
(Sherwood  = Shear Wood)

We concentrate on the meanings of our tens of thousands of words that we have 
linguistically lost sight of how they fit together and came about.

Languages (like for example Algonquin) with many fewer words have to be far 
more linguistically clever and so the speakers have to be much more 
internally 
aware of how their language works.   </HTML>