ibex hat geschrieben:by the way - is short a time ago completely wrong, do I have to put a short time?
Yes it is completely wrong, that's why you can use it
For real now, that kind of construction is not wrong at all it's just rather uncommon. It is a kind of fronting which means positioning a part of a clause further to the front than it would occur originally, although usually fronting is used with words that follow the predicate that are then placed at the beginning of the clause. Fronting shifts the emphasis to the fronted word (or in some cases to the thus changed construction).
The Briton present at the time of discussion thought for a while and then said he guessed that British people rather proud themselves / focus on hitting the very word and being really precise.
It's not just the British though, every native speaker uses that "plain" language, as you call it. Even so, the English used in Britain is far from being more precise than German or French, it's a rather colorful language that uses a lot of idioms and is often used metaphoric, ironic, etc.
The real reason is most likely a combination of two things: a lack of inflection and tradition.
The first is quite obvious, if you think about it. If you parse a sentence you need to identify the function each word has in it. Inflection marks the parts of a clause for their function. In a languages like English, that lack (almost all) inflection, the function follows from a words position in a sentence.
This is even more important as English has no real distinction between noun, adjective and verb anymore. Words can easily change their category if you like and there is already a significant number of words that dictionaries list in more than one category. One of the more prominent examples being the word "sound" which can be a noun, an adjective and a verb. That lack of distinction adds to the need for a strict word order.
As a consequence of the fixed word order, it is much harder to nest structures within a sentence. A nested structure, unless clearly marked as such, adds a lot of ambiguity when you try to parse a sentence. Clear structure markings are rare in spoken language though, thus English does not lend itself well to nesting, which is one of the main reasons English does
seem simpler.
My second point was tradition, and that's one of the things that is much harder to outline here, so I'll just mention the fact that English is traditionally a more "action-centered" language than German which is more or less "fact-centered". Both have advantages though.
And indeed, dealing with French (my French is still rather limited, though), I am under the impression that the French vocabulary isn't a particularly precise one.
I am really thrilled to hear your opinions on the subject, for I find it an absolutely fascinating one!
It may seem as if French is less precise but that's most likely due to a "German" approach to the French language. You see, what we call "words" in french is not the same as what we call words in German. French has developed into a language that is spoken in phrases. You can see that best in the way French is pronounced (liaison) but also in the way meaning is assigned to a phrase rather than single words. Many of the Words of the French language have no more meaning of their own than German affixes, they merely add to or modify the meaning of the phrase.
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