The problem with English is that it's a kitchen-sink language; part Latin, part French, part Anglo-Saxon, with parts borrowed from the rest of the world, too.

Context is important; and subtle variations in word choice can change the percieved context of a sentence: consider "meat", "flesh", "body", "corpse", or "carcass".

All refer to the something that was once alive and is now dead, but the word choice conveys a different "mood" and frames a different way of the looking at a given scenario.

English is "rich" in the sense that there a subtle shades of meaning; and like Perl, few people are literate enough to understand most of them. It makes English hard to debug; when a non-native speaker of English makes a mistake, it's hard to know which mistake he or she made, when there are many possible choices that could be meant.

I've heard "Jane" pronounced as "chain", "chen", "Jen", "Jan", "Shayne", or "Jay". Like Perl, there are too many valid parses for a mistake; and like Perl, this makes figuring out what someone was trying to say far too much work at times.

--
Ytrew,
"who hates having to decipher the streetcar driver's accent just to recognize the name of his own street :-("