ceigered:

He could not agree with the amendments to the draft resolution proposed by the delegation of India.

Is this not equally ambiguous in any language?
If there were multiple resolutions:

Li ne povis konsenti kun la amendoj al la (draft) rezolucioj kiuj estis proponataj de India.

Then Eo is just as ambiguous as English in that sense.

I honestly think there are many ambiguous things in other languages, it's just that English gets a lot of attention because its "popular" at the moment.

English ambiguities have nothing to do with its popularity. Esperanto is far less ambiguous than English. And you are totally wrong about the slavic languages - they have gramatical cases and genders which do not permit that kind of ambiguity at all. In Polish the two meanings would require two different sentences, which could not be mistaken:

He could not agree with the amendments to the draft resolution proposed by the delegation of India.

[1] Nie mógł się zgodzić z poprawkami do szkicu uchwały ::*zaproponowanej::* przez delegację Indii.

[2] Nie mógł się zgodzić z poprawkami do szkicu uchwały ::*zaproponowanymi::* przez delegację Indii.

And if both are plural:

[3] Nie mógł się zgodzić z poprawkami do szkiców uchwały ::*zaproponowanych::* przez delegację Indii.

[4] Nie mógł się zgodzić z poprawkami do szkiców uchwały ::*zaproponowanymi::* przez delegację Indii.

Do you see that all four sentences are quite different, because they carry different meanings?

Many thanks folks for your interesting contributions. I think I can begin to see now what speakers of other languages are on about when they describe English as imprecise.

Of course, any language which doesn't mark grammatical function in its words (as English frequently does not), and also has words with multiple unconnected meanings, has the potential to produce potentially ambiguous sentences.

I imagine from what I have heard about Chinese, that this language would also have this characteristic.

However the label imprecise doesn't seem quite fair.

Mostly when we use language there is some context. And this will usually effectively render it quite clear what meaning is intended.

It is very difficult to imagine, for example, the situation in which both meanings of 'I saw her duck' would be equally probable. And in the middle of a political debate the participants would all know whether the Indians had proposed the amendments or the resolution.

Any imprecision of English is then largely, in truth, an illusion.

However, as someone pointed out, the potential ambiguities in English sentences are a rich source for comedy. Listen to some of the programmes on the UK's Radio 4 for spectacular displays.

Actually, I wonder if the incidence of such witty manipulation of the language might be less in other countries whose languages do not have the same potential.

As someone with experience of teaching English to foreigners, I feel I must make some comment on 'pick up on'.

The combination of verbs with prepositions to produce other verbs is a fundamental characteristic of English, which, incidentally, hardly ever produces any problems in comprehension by native speakers.

In the teaching of the so called phrasal verbs to foreigners I have noticed that the approach is often to translate them into more specific words.

So in this instance, the explanation given in the class might be in terms of detect, or notice, or observe.

Unfortunately, this approach whilst useful in explaining a particular sentence is not helpful in general. And is certainly not how a native speaker understands them.

What native speakers have done is to absorb the general meanings of prepositions used in this way, so that the verb + preposition combinations are really like a phrase. Native speakers do not learn such combinations like totally new lexical items.

By the way, if I had to translate into Esperanto my question as to what feature they were picking up on, I think I might say 'Al kiu karakterizaĵo (de la angla) ili reagas'.

geo1963:
English ambiguities have nothing to do with its popularity.

Well, not in the sense that it's more ambiguous because it is popular. However, because there is much attention drawn towards English (because it is popular), more people notice the ambiguities. Which does create a slightly unfair bias.

Esperanto is far less ambiguous than English. And you are totally wrong about the slavic languages - they have gramatical cases and genders which do not permit that kind of ambiguity at all. In Polish the two meanings would require two different sentences, which could not be mistaken:

Then why does the Russian masculine/neuter dative have the exact same ending as the female accusative? Furthermore, do the slavic languages not have several occasions where the dative and accusative are used in eachother's functions? For a non-native speaker, such things are quite strange and confusing.

Do you see that all four sentences are quite different, because they carry different meanings?

That does become clear (unfortunately I can't quite comprehend what each one means, but I can assume they all bring focus to what belongs to whom and where those amendments are going?). English however can do this to:
He could not agree with the amendments to the draft resolution proposed by the delegation of India.

He could not agree with the amendments to the delegation of India's proposed draft resolution.
He could not agree with the amendments proposed by the delegation of India to the draft resolution.
He could not agree the delegation of India's amendments to their draft resolution.
etc et al.

The main difference is that in English, there's more of a freedom to just scrap the precision, especially if the reader/listener is given more context, or already knows what's happening. So it could be said that rather than saying that English is imprecise, as if it is incapable of being precise, English has more flexibility on how precision is treated.

I had thought that more synthetic languages like Polish might be able to emulate such imprecision to some degree, but perhaps I was "jumping the gun" and not thinking about how such imprecision would look strange in a language where everything has a marker so the reader/listener does not misunderstand :-/

Anyway, historically English has been more a colonial language, linking cultures that didn't necessarily have the same features as older versions of English, and before that middle English was more a mixture of the various Anglo-Saxon, Nordic and Danish dialects with a bit of French thrown in, so the language is more adapted to that sort of ever-changing demographic and mercantile lifestyle. Polish on the other hand is a language from a kingdom more historically rooted into the ground, which probably shows in the more conservative manner Polish conducts itself as a language compared to things like English.

ceigered:
The main difference is that in English, there's more of a freedom to just scrap the precision, especially if the reader/listener is given more context, or already knows what's happening. So it could be said that rather than saying that English is imprecise, as if it is incapable of being precise, English has more flexibility on how precision is treated.

This problem does not arise in face-to-face conversations, but, as Claude Piron stated, in late translations, where you do not have an oportunity to talk with the one that produced the text. The ambiguity can be avoided if you know that you are ambiguous. But the sentences, like the one presented, are just normal ones and they very often pop up in English. Without the adjective-noun agreement and proper context they are ambiguous in their very nature. This kind of ambiguity almost never happens in Polish. But Polish is not international and is very hard to learn for foreigners.

I think it is fairly clear that there is a connection between language and mind, as well as a connection between language and culture.

It is usually the case that our thoughts are expressed in language, using the concepts which the language provides labels for.

Also obvious, is that any culture that is preoccupied with certain aspects of life will have a rich vocabulary and collection of fixed phrases in those areas.

The ticklish question is which is the chicken and which the egg.

There are certain aspects of English culture which one might well be tempted to explain through English's imprecision, or tolerance of ambiguity.

There seems to be a parallel between the lack of systemacity in our system of laws (or indeed our constitutional institutions) on the one hand, and that the meanings of our English sentences are context dependent on the other hand. Both are imbued with a readiness to deal with the specific and the particular rather than the absolute and the systematic.

The English have a soft spot for the eccentric and the quirky, attributes that are less congruent with any explict determination of meaning - which you get when you have cases and concordance and all the other grammatical paraphernalia of some Continental languages.

We are also a very tolerant society, and suspicious of big ideas and grand schemes.

How much of this, I wonder, comes from our daily encounters with the vagaries of our English language, which have already shaped our attitudes to exactness and regularity.

All of those examples are very clever, but as people have already pointed out, there are ways to make them less ambiguous, and in fact most of those sentences would be avoided by a native speaker because of their ambiguity. Also it is worth pointing out that language doesn't exist in a bubble. There would always be some sort of further context to let you know what the person was talking about.

Yes Valleta, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and quite clearly native English don't go around misunderstanding each other.

What makes the assertion that English is imprecise seem at first sight outrageous is the phenomenal vocabulary of English that has resulted form a very long history of sweeping up anything that seems useful from other languages around the globe.

This feature of English allows many fine distinctions to be made if required.

And even at the level of basic grammar, it seems shocking to the English speaker learning French that the French are quite happy not to distinguish between I have done, I did, or between I shall do, I will do, I am doing and I will be doing.

I don't know how many variants of 'walk' there are in French, but I would be very surprised if they could even come close to English's:

amble, stroll, strut, swagger, pace, stride, stamp, plod, march, trudge, saunter, creep, sneak, stomp, tiptoe, pad, waddle, lurch, stagger, shuffle, limp, shamble, trek and so on.

Incidentally on the subject of the richness of the English verb, it is striking how English and American films are so full of action, in comparison to the home-grown French cinema.

Is this the language influencing culture, or the other way round,

sudanglo:Incidentally on the subject of the richness of the English verb, it is striking how English and American films are so full of action, in comparison to the home-grown French cinema.

Perhaps they are full of sense instead.

Perhaps they are full of sense instead.

Debatable, they certainly lean to being more arty-farty.