Thank you, Jordan~ an Weirdelves, for some enlightening expositions on English (and beyond).
Although somewhat prejudiced, I do agree with you about the wonderful qualities of English. It is both a broad paint brush, and a finely-honed surgical tool, and yet it is made of stuff that changes year by year. With English, we can always select le mot juste to express not just a meaning, but the feeling with which we wish to imbue it. I suppose, to return to Ann's musings somewhat, this makes English a hard language for non-native speakers to comprehend precisely when heard, but is a great advantage when the aim is to compose a sentence to get across a concept or meaning. Even if the vocabulary isn't chosen exactly correctly, the idea can be conveyed.
It's one of my "gripes" with the abominable eu. It insists upon standardisation in everything (you WILL use hectares and litres and mercury-less barometers and straight cucumbers and so much else that we don't really want or need), yet it has at its disposal a language that cannot really be bettered (gerundatives aside) but fails to promote it. And as for the 2012 Olympics ... what an insult that the prime language will be french!!!
A total aside here. I remember reading about how our language assimilated words from elsewhere. After the Norman conquest, high society language was largely French, whereas the peasantry still largely spoke their ancestral Norse and Saxon derived tongue. This is still evident today, in the names of meats and the animals they come from. A peasant's sheep became mutton when served to a lord; pig became pork; etc.