The English language hasn't got where it is by being pure

From The Miracle of Language by Richard Lederer, page 24. A couple of passages touch on elements pertinent to my suspicion that language is subject to many of the same types of forces such as variation and selection as described by Darwin. In this instance, Lederer first addresses the catholicity of English. On the one hand, there is an immense vocabulary that lends itself to exquisite nuance and precision.

It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Webster's Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the compendious Oxford English Dictionary lists 615,000, but that is only part of the total. Technical and scientific terms, family words, slang and argot, and spanking-new creations, unenshrined in ordinary dictionaries, would add hundreds of thousands more, bringing the total of entries to as high as two million. In comparison, German, according to traditional estimates, has a vocabulary of about 185,000, Russian 130,000, and French fewer than 100,000.

One reason English has accumulated such a vast word hoard is that it is the most hospitable and democratic language that has ever existed. English has never rejected a word because of its race, creed, or national origin. Having welcomed into its vocabulary words from a multitude of other languages and dialects, ancient and modern, far and near, English is unique in the number and variety of its borrowed words. Fewer than thirty percent of our words spring from the original Anglo-Saxon word stock; the rest are imported. As the poet Carl Sandburg once said, "The English language hasn't got where it is by being pure."

On the other hand, English is also extremely efficient.

The great nineteenth-century linguist Jakob Grimm wrote, "In richness, good sense, and terse convenience, no other living language may be put beside English." By "terse convenience" Grimm meant that ours is a strikingly direct and concise tongue. Translate a document from English into French or Spanish or German or Russian, and the translation, if true to the original, will emerge about twenty-five percent longer. Examine bilingual signs and messages and you will find that the English half is inevitably more compact.

[snip]

A careful count of the number of syllables needed to translate the Gospel according to Mark into various languages indicates that, compared to other tongues, brevity is the soul of English:

English 29,000
Teutonic languages (average) 32,650
French 36,500
Slavic languages (average) 36,500
Romance languages (average) 40,200
Indo-Iranian languages (average) 43,100

So English is both a language of great precision as well as brevity. It is much easier to communicate an exact message more efficiently. Nearly 30% more efficiently compared to Indo-Iranian languages. Does that make a difference? Could do. Assume that the effort in communicating is directly proportionate to productivity (as a hypothetical). In that case, 30% more efficient communication translates into 30% greater productivity. Is the English language farmer who sets aside 130 baskets of wheat more likely to make it through the winter than the Indo-Iranian farmer with only 100 baskets? Sure.

Now all that is built on a fairly weak foundation of assumptions but the underlying principle that efficiency of communication likely has a material impact on both productivity as well as on survival is, I think, sound. Certainly in manufacturing and business management, when you design processes to optimize efficiency and effectiveness (precision), you usually see a compounding effect. One small improvement here allows a slightly larger improvement over there - pretty soon you see a cascade of productivity improvement. Is language the same? I favor the idea that it is.