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Chinese dialects rely on tone changes. Grammatical inflection has nothing to do with the sound of words : it referes to changes in the words themselves according to changes in their function within the sentence. English is a mildly inflected language: I my/mine me we our/ours us I go you go he...

What the Japanese notice is that Chinese and English are languages with minimal inflection which rely heavily on word-order. They use Chinese characters for the meaning value, & sometimes the syllabic value (albeit very different from current Chinese pronunciation), but their grammar employs...

It helps to have a large vocabulary. I remember one occasion when my father was dealing with a business visitor, an Italian living in America. My father has a large range of interests, & his visitor was curious as to how he came to know so many things. Father said he was "mostly self-taught", &...

I hope it will not be taken in bad part if I assert my opinion that Mr. Bachmann is getting ahead of himself with his vision of the evolution of the English language. The changes which he regards as practically accomplished appear to me rather far off, & still possible to avert or alter if they...

It's worth pointing out that newspapers have been fonts of atrocious English since before 1900. Perhaps a third of the outright condemnations in Modern English Usage are directed at "newspaperisms" (my coinage, not Fowler's) — for some reason, newspaper writers seem to be fond of mixing brief...