BrowserUk: Creole--that's exactly what I was reaching for. That or 'common practice' English (not English teacher English): there's more than one way to say what you mean (and plenty of cool slang).

ggg: yes, that's dead on. C is at the base of a large family of languages, kind of like Latin and the Romance languages. On the other hand, Latin was more compact than English, because a lot more meaning was loaded into each word (verb => (verb stem, tense, subject), noun => (noun stem, plurality, (subject, object, indirect object, adverb, adjective, direct address) ).

TomDLux: Now that I think of it, Bash & the file/text utils as a whole from are quite a bit like German. Some of the language constructions are very similar between German and Old English, just as the shell and older versions of Perl have a similar set of constructions (substituting in for $X in double quoted strings, here documents, open for input | output | pipe ).

Keem em coming.

P.S. As for Esperanto, I'd say that's more like Java (designed for with a particular philosophy in mind, with a fairly standard syntax). Except you can order coffee in Esperanto in a few words, as opposed to Java, where you'd spend an hour or more making cup, grinder, waiter, and money objects, and importing java.cafe.* (not to mention Java Beans (tm) ).