>> 5. Word munging is uncommon in English.

Most of what you say above about English boils down to this: English doesn't compose words from parts. And so, without conjugation (in general, grammatical inflection), you need to have different words to represent different versions of the same concept. That's where the gigantism of English vocabulary comes from and where the use of the auxiliary verbs (to be and to have), comes from. The later are needed to slightly tweak the meaning of words to make them express different concepts; and, sometimes, you just need to invent a new word to say a new thing.

So for instance you go from simple "I eat" to more complex "I have eaten" to the cumbersome "I have been eating" and "I would have been eating" or, heaven forbid, "I would have had eaten". In Greek -and, I bet, in Russian or any language that allows inflection- these variations on the basic concept of eating can be expressed by verb terminations, although the occasional auxiliary verb or particle is also used: "έφαγα" (I have eaten), "έτρωγα" (I have been eating), "θα έτρωγα" (I would have been eating) and "θα είχα φάει" ("I would have had eaten) [granted, "τρώω", is an anomalous verb and its different forms sound like different words altogether... but they are composed in the same way as er omalous words, "κοιτάω", "κοίταγα", "θα κοίταγα", "θα είχα κοιτάξει" for "looking" rather than "eating"].

Then there's the thing with gendered nouns, that are absent in English but present in many other European languages. For example, to say "a male dog" in English you have to - well, do what I just did or add a pronoun ("he-dog", I don't know how this practice is called); respectively "she-dog" for female dog. In Greek you say "σκύλος, σκύλα, σκυλί" (skyl-os -a -i) for male, female and neuter (i.e. when gender is not important).

This makes English a language of many small words combined in different ways to give new meaning to utterances. It does really remind of ideographic writing as opposed to an alphabet.

But let's talk about what our languages lack that English has - you say that English has articles to indicate specificity. Most Slavic languages lack those and so native speakers of Slavic languages stand out when they use English. Instead of "the program has a bug", "progam has bug", instead of "search a list of integers", "search list of integers", etc.

In Greek again, we have a single word to indicate the position of an object "σε", as in "_στο_ τραπέζι" ("_on_ the table"), "_στην_ κουζίνα" (_in_ the kitchen), "πάω _στη_ θάλασσα" ("I'm going _to_ the beach") and "_σε_ δείχνω" ("I'm pointing _at_ you"). For me at least, after 15 years of living in the UK and using English every day, the correct use of thse different location-indicators (particles?) is still the last frontier that I haven't fully conquered and I find myself making mistakes when using them. "In the page" or "on the page"? "To the house" or "at the house"? Leaving things unsaid and relying on concept is all well and fine until you need to speak in a language that makes the ommitted information clear. Then you're in trouble and you realise you actually didn't have such a clear idea of the unsaid, after all.