Hand Chaucer to an English teenager and watch the panic. Hand Dante to an Italian one and watch them shrug and keep reading.
Spanish readers manage the epic of the Cid with just a few footnotes. French readers breeze through François Villon’s lament for last winter’s snows. English readers, a couple of generations after Dante, are lost.
Something odd happened to English. It changed faster than its Romance and Germanic cousins. Almost all the change ran towards simpler grammar at breakneck speed.
Take inflection, the endings that tell you a word’s job in a sentence. Old English had about a dozen forms of “the”. Modern English has one.
Those endings once told you who did what to whom, so words could move freely in a sentence, like Latin. Now we have position rules: “dog bites man” and “man bites dog” differ only in order, and one of them is more newsworthy thann the other.
Gender is gone too, thankfully. Old English made “woman” neuter and the sun feminine. German still keeps a neuter Mädchen.
Verbs lost the most. Spanish cantar has over forty simple forms. English sing has five: sing, sings, singing, sang, sung, that’s it. The -s in “she sings” is the last twitch of a once-lavish system, and some Brits still get it wrong.
Why did this happen?
Probably several causes at once. Germanic stress lands early in a word, so endings got mumbled. Norse-speaking neighbours spoke a close relative whose endings differed just enough to confuse. After the Norman Conquest, English lost its schoolmasters and there was nobody to police it. Adult learners drop endings yet still get their message across. It seems languages with many adult learners tend to shed complexity. A kind of linguistic no-bullshit principle.
Spelling froze while vowels kept shifting, which is why though, through and tough share letters and little else.
About 1.5 billion people speak English today, roughly three quarters as an additional language.
Empire, trade and Hollywood opened the door, that’s for sure, but a light grammar made walking through it cheap.