I just cringe that this comment is always the one being made whenever monolingual native English speakers gather together to talk about their language.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted here. This absolutely is the go-to quote for monolingual English-speaking laypeople who think that English is “exceptional” in some way - whether that be “bad” or “good” - when in reality English is a pretty unremarkable language overall.
It does have a few mildly interesting idiosyncrasies, but “polysemy” and “having loanwords” (even “having a large percentage of loanwords”) are not really among them.
I just cringe that this comment is always the one being made whenever monolingual native English speakers gather together to talk about their language.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted here. This absolutely is the go-to quote for monolingual English-speaking laypeople who think that English is “exceptional” in some way - whether that be “bad” or “good” - when in reality English is a pretty unremarkable language overall.
It does have a few mildly interesting idiosyncrasies, but “polysemy” and “having loanwords” (even “having a large percentage of loanwords”) are not really among them.