This is on purpose not a very concrete question, I simply want to know some interesting properties other languages have that English doesn't, or features you even think English ought to have, this can be with respect to all linguistic fields you can imagine (grammar, phonetics etc.)
For the correct answer I'll choose the most voted property.
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Why the downvotes? – Adam Bittlingmayer 5 hours ago
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There are features that are relatively common globally that are missing in most or all of SAE, including English, eg causative, or distinguishing "with" for instruments from "with" for people. – Adam Bittlingmayer 5 hours ago
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1@AdamBittlingmayer: I guess (I haven't cast a downvote here) for the same reasons as there are close votes. I admit that I often use close votes and downvotes in combination because this enables some automatic sanitizing scripts. – jknappen 3 hours ago
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And why the close votes? – Adam Bittlingmayer 2 hours ago
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1@AdamBittlingmayer "…distinguishing "with" for instruments from "with" for people" Amusingly, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) claimed that no language on earth distinguished the two. Evidently they didn't look at anything outside SAE, since even Latin keeps the two distinct! – Draconis 27 mins ago
3 Answers
Here are some features that are common to many languages, but absent in English. It's worth taking WALS entries with a grain of salt, but the chapters are great at calling out potential issues and borderline cases and identifying areal patterns.
In no particular order, here are some common features that English does not have.
English does not have productive full or partial reduplication.
English does not have an associative plural construction.
English does not have distributive numerals.
English lacks a simple vowel system: Cross-linguistically, three (/a/, /i/, /u/) or five (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/) vowel systems are very common, having a lot of different vowel qualities like English is uncommon.
I'll give the glib answer:
A straightforward/predictable orthography.
Out of all the languages which have established writing systems, the vast majority are to some extent phonemic; not all have a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, but it's generally possible to figure out how a word is pronounced, given nothing but its written form.
Only a few languages lack this property; English is one of them. (Others include Mandarin and Japanese—so when I say "only a few", I'm going by number of languages, not number of speakers.)
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2Why does this count as an "interesting" property? – user6726 17 hours ago
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4@user6726 Because native English-speakers, in my experience, don't tend to think about it as something unusual—even though it's reached the point that national English-orthography competitions are held in America (spelling bees). – Draconis 17 hours ago