> There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort.

…uh, French? English has such a huge amount of French vocabulary that it does not take a huge amount of effort for an English speaker like me to, say, read a Wikipedia page in French, despite my limited knowledge of the language. Pronunciation is a different matter, however, that's true.

> it’s us who are odd: almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.

Might be weird from an Indo-European perspective. But consider this: firstly, it's not like other IE languages' grammatical gender isn't being simplified. Maybe it hasn't been eliminated yet, but English is not a complete oddball here.

Second, lacking grammatical gender is hardly unusual once you go outside Indo-European!

> There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third‑person singular.

English has a small and not very expressive set of verb inflections, okay. It's not alone there. Yes, maybe other languages don't have inflections limited in that specific way, but that kind of specificity is far from unusual.

> English started out as, essentially, a kind of German.

Well… Germanic doesn't really mean German. Old English does look somewhat familiar to a German speaker, though.

> In linguistics circles it’s risky to call one language ‘easier’ than another one, for there is no single metric by which we can determine objective rankings. But even if there is no bright line between day and night, we’d never pretend there’s no difference between life at 10am and life at 10pm.

Languages are not “easier” or “harder” in isolation. What matters is how similar a language is to those already know. The author does nothing to refute this and comes up with the bizarre concept that “English is ‘easier’ than other Germanic languages”… how so? I could make a convincing argument that English is significantly harder than other Germanic languages, for instance.

> normal languages don’t dangle prepositions in this way

What's the author's idea of “normal” here? Latin?

> the has no specifically masculine form to match man […] strangeness

Arabic has no masculine form of “the”. Is it weird?

> English got hit by a firehose spray of words from yet more languages

As opposed to other languages, which never import possibly duplicative vocabulary en masse? Japanese has a lot of Chinese vocabulary alongside native words, for an easy example. And this is hardly unique to Japan.

> The very idea of etymology being a polyglot smorgasbord, each word a fascinating story of migration and exchange, seems everyday to us. But the roots of a great many languages are much duller.

But the roots of a great many other languages are similarly interesting!

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This tells you various interesting (and correct!) facts about English's history which a student of historical linguistics could tell you, and maybe that's good, it could get more people interested in the subject! It utterly fails at proving its thesis though. English is a bit of an outlier, but it's not a unique one. Of course, you could argue that no other language has the same combination of weirdnesses, but that's because they're different languages!