&gt; First he complains about the fact that we use an alphabet.<p>No, he doesn&#x27;t. What he says is: &quot;it has probably the worst alphabetical writing system in the world&quot;, and &quot;What an alphabet does is spell out the sounds of words at the level of consonants and vowels. And I don’t think you can find a language that does it worse or more perversely than English does.&quot;<p>I think you&#x27;ve misunderstood the structure of the paragraph in which he says those things. He mentions Chinese and Cambodian not to say &quot;these would be better&quot; but to say &quot;you might want to respond to my complaint about English orthography by saying these languages are worse, but that would miss the point because they&#x27;re the way they are because they&#x27;re non-alphabetic, and what I&#x27;m claiming is that among alphabetic systems English has a particularly bad one&quot;.<p>&gt; The large vocabulary [...] is what makes English so attractive for scientific application.<p>What Pullum says is: &quot;You may think of this as a rich lexical treasure-house that we should prize; some might call it a needless and memory-burdening overstock of alternatives, reminiscent of the cereal aisle of a modern supermarket. The English lexicon could have been far less profligate, given a little forethought.&quot; In other words: yeah, it&#x27;s good to have a wide variety of ideas represented in your vocabulary, but the English lexicon is redundant and could have been markedly smaller <i>without</i> substantial loss of expressivity and flexibility.<p>(I am not sure whether I agree with him, but I&#x27;m pretty sure I disagree with you if you&#x27;re suggesting that science benefits particularly from the rich vocabulary of English. Technical terms can be, and are, imported into any language; that&#x27;s not where English is unusual; and science doesn&#x27;t make particular use of e.g. the ability to distinguish between {cow,beef,veal} or {sheep,lamb,mutton} or {sleepy,tired,fatigued,knackered,exhausted,weary,...}.)