&gt; But in practice, what twisted collective mind could come up and stay with &quot;Qu&#x27;est ce que c&#x27;est ?&quot; (What is it ?) ? That monster literally translate to &quot;What is this that it is ?&quot;.<p>But it&#x27;s only three syllables, like &quot;what is it?&quot; It&#x27;s also kind of atomic. My French isn&#x27;t native, but I don&#x27;t think you can say &quot;qui est ce qui ça est?&quot;, if you want to ask &quot;who is it?&quot;, i.e. the initial two syllables &quot;qu&#x27;est ce que&quot; seem indivisible.<p>Comparisons about one language being more verbose&#x2F;complex&#x2F;harder than another never seem to really hold up under scrutiny. Usually when comparing two languages, one exhibits simplicity in one area where the other exhibits simplicity in another and it all roughly balances out. Humans seem to demand approximately a constant level of complexity from their languages. English for example has pretty complicated consonant clusters (e.g. hurdle, or angsts) to make up for fewer syllables. I&#x27;m not even sure English tends to have fewer syllables than French, as their common Celtic roots seem to prefer fewer syllables.