but it’s damn easy to make yourself understood.

Words ordering with grammar can be unimportant to being known.

I think you're confusing a reasonably short period in recent history with "forever".

In History there were quite a lot of "international languages of trade" other than English. It seems to depend very much on which nations were the top empire of the age and because the last two top empires were English-speaking countries (first Britain, then after that the United States), the English language has been dominant as a second language for a over a century now, but before that the English language already existed in a form very similar to the modern form and yet it wasn't at all an "international language of trade" (in fact, at least in Europe, before English it was French that was the dominant language of trade).

I bet that the next "international language of trade" will be Chinese.

On the flip side, a lot of other languages have retained structures which require a detailed knowing of grammar in part because they haven't needed to be learned by amateurs.

In french, that's really the name that is given to them, colloquially : doigts de pied (foot fingers)

The real term is orteils (toes)

I knew someone who used the term "bird leaves" which I find hilarious.

Same in Russian: пальцы ног (fingers of the foot).

And in German, Dutch and Afrikaans (at least), we call gloves hand-shoes (Handschuhe / handschoenen / handskoene)

Apparently a lot of Old English poetry was written with ample use of kennings, e.g. ‘Beowulf’.

I was assuming one of these things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Detergent_tablet.jpg

I'd say it's a plate

I think you're replying to the wrong comment, but I know what you mean - nostrils are called "Nasenlöcher" (nose-holes) in German.

You think German and French don't borrow words?

This gives it an unusual amount of flexibility

English grammar is the opposite of flexible, since it relies on word order where other languages use inflections. In Russian, you can often jumble the word order, and the meaning wouldn't change. Vocabulary of Russian was extensively borrowed from Greek, Arabic and Turkic languages in middle ages, German and French during the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, and English in the twentieth, particularly in regard to trade, new technology, or societal developments. If you pay attention, you'll notice that a language borrows or invents words when there's a shade of meaning missing in the existing vocabulary, that is precisely represented by the new word. None of that has anything to do with the initiative in industrial development, as you may have noticed from the fact that Russia was an agrarian country into early twentieth century.

Your idea is a form of linguistic relativity, which has only some evidence for a small subset of it.

Reminder English will happily mug other languages for words, if they are handing new ones out for free? It's gonna take that new word and run with it.

I'm learning Korean, in South Korea they use so much English vocabulary and it's all spelled phonetically, for example table (yes they use that word) becomes 테이블 (teibeul) and then you have to pronounce it like a Korean word which always sounds a little weird. Japanese is similar, but the possible syllables in Japanese are much more limited so it ends up sounding even weirder and sometimes isn't immediately recognisable as English.

They may have. Several Japanese words for everyday objects are taken from other languages despite having earlier words for those things. E.g. bread is pan (from Portuguese) and ball is boru (English).

Though my personal favorite is black hole. Despite having different words for black and hole, black hole is translated as burakkuhoru

I studied Japanese for like 6 months before I went and they were GUSHING at me spitting out me 15 phrases and trying to understand their words. if you're japanese and reading this now ILY so much and thank you for making that trip the best of my life.