And why does English seem to have so many more contractions than, say, Spanish? Are we just so lazy that we can’t be bothered to pronounce a few extra syllables?
English doesn’t come from Latin. English is a Germanic language, and is thus more closely related to German and Dutch. English got most of its Latinate words during the Norman occupation (beginning 1066), and stole the rest from various unsuspecting foreigners. 
But that doesn’t really answer your question, because even German has grammatical gender. The reason English doesn’t have gender is because English is the end result of a radical simplification process. It came from various Germanic tribal dialects that, in the process of trade and interbreeding, dropped gender as an impediment to communication. A lot of our other inflections were dropped during the Norman occupation, when English was relegated to a peasant’s language and French was the language of royalty.
A few of the other languages that use a unisex 3rd-person pronoun:
Bengali
Finnish
Hindustani (i.e. Hindi+Urdu)
Mongolian
Persian
Turkish
In general, most of the Ural-Altaic and modern Indo-Iranian languages.
My wife, being a native of India, often said “she” when she meant “he” and vice versa, until she got used to speaking English. (Hindustani has another oddity: the same word, kal, that means both ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’. My wife has often said “tomorrow” when she means “yesterday” and vice versa. Not only that: it uses the same word, parson, for both ‘the day before yesterday’ and ‘the day after tomorrow’!)
Arabic and Hebrew not only have gendered 3rd-person pronouns, they also have gendered 2nd-person pronouns. You say “you” differently depending on whether you’re talking to a man or woman.
Arabic and Hebrew have gendered verbs in the 2nd and 3rd persons to match the gendered pronouns. The verbs are conjugated differently depending on whether the subject is masculine or feminine.
While Hindustani, with no gender in the pronouns, nevertheless has gendered verbs in all three persons. This way you can sometimes indicate who you’re talking about by just saying a feminine or masculine verb, without even needing to mention the subject.
Hindustani has borrowed vast amounts of loanwords from Persian. Now, Persian has no gender at all. But when Hindustani borrows a Persian word, with nothing to mark gender, it assigns gender to it seemingly arbitrarily. There’s no apparent reason why the originally genderless bâzû ‘arm’ should be masculine and zabân ‘tongue’ should be feminine—but there you are. 
French is much more systematic about this: when borrowing a genderless English word, it’s automatically masculine (unless it refers to a female). If a language has a neuter, like Lithuanian, it would make sense to assign all genderless loanwords to the neuter as the default.
English lack of gender, as pointed out by Mario Pei, makes it easier for cheating spouses. The husband can tell his wife he’s just going out to see “a friend.” But in Italian, for example, he has to specify a male friend, un amico, or a female friend, un’amica.
Other languages that use the dual:
Ancient Greek
Arabic
Sanskrit
Hebrew has a few fossilized dual expressions, mainly for parts of the body that come in pairs: e.g. reglayim ‘feet’. But also, oddly, tsohrayim ‘noon’ (because of the two halves of the daytime?) and Mitsrayim ‘Egypt’ (referring to Upper and Lower Egypt?).
Actually, in the Present “sense” (not properly a tense in Hebrew), even the 1st person has gendered “verbs” - Ani omer - I (masc) say; Ani omeret - I (fem) say.
And Mayim (water) and Shamayim (sky) - almost certainly related to each other (Genesis). Dunno why dual for these either. And not at all fossilized - almost any noun, not only body parts, and not only things you normally associate with pairs, can be given a dual meaning (i.e., “a pair of”), by adding -ayim or -atayim (fem) to it - as in Sha’atayim for two hours, Matayim for two hundred. etc…, and this is extensible, in the sense that if I refer to a table with two computers sitting on it and say Makhshevayim, (“compu-pair”) everyone will understand what I mean (but I admit it would sound kinda funny …)
Dan Abarbanel
Hmm, when I took Biblical Hebrew I was taught that the dual suffix was not productive. Maybe it’s been revived.
The example you gave with omer/omeret is not a verb conjugation; it’s a nominal sentence* with a participle (po‘el) as the predicate. The participle, functioning as an adjective, has gender agreement with the subject that it modifies. Ani omer is taken to mean ‘I say’, but the construction is actually ‘I (am) one-who-says’ or ‘I (am) saying’.
If you actually conjugated the verb, it would use the same form for masculine and feminine in the 1st person: (ani) omar, (nakhnu) no’mar.
*A nominal sentence is one made of nouns with no verb. The subject “is” (understood to be) the predicate without needing to use the verb “to be.” This feature also lacking in English.
When I first read this I thought, “Wow, that is pretty odd. How can they keep their narratives straight.” But then I thought about it some more, and I’ve come to the conclusion that having separate words for “today” and “tomorrow” is superfluous. The tense of the verb covers the meaning of word, so a simple word meaning something like “one day removed” or “two days removed” does just as good a job at twice the efficiency.
We used to have it. Thou/thee/thy/thine/ used to be used as the familiar, singular form, for when you were speaking to a friend, or to a social inferior. You was for superiors, and for plurals.
I don’t know if you can call this “missing”, because we have a replacement, but English is the only language I know of that has defective verbs, like can/be able to. What’s defective about it is that for some tenses you have to replace can with be able to:
I/you/he/they/we can
I/you/he/they/we could
but
I’ve/we’ve/you’ve/they’ve/he’s been able to
I’ve/we’ve/you’ve/they’ve/he will be able to.
I like conocer and saber as opposed to just “to know” in English.
From http://www.studyspanish.com/lessons/sabcon.htm
saber
to know a fact, to know something thoroughly, to know how to do something
conocer
to be acquainted with a person, place, or thing
Well, I said this isn’t really a verb tense, but in modern Hebrew it effectively has become a true tense - there are many participle forms used as verbs which simply don’t make sense as “nouns” or gerunds any more.
Dan Abarbanel
How come they replace the present tense of the verb with a participle? Don’t they use the real present tense any more?
I’m asking because I studied Biblical Hebrew, and haven’t caught up with what they’ve done to the language in the recent 2000 years.
English doesn’t have a single source of standards. New words, spellings, formulations, even grammar rules can appear and dissapear on the whim of the populace at large.
While this makes the language very flexible, it DOES create a problem for time travelers. Communication with English-speaking people just a few hundred years from now is difficult, and those blokes in 3260 were practically unintelligable. Damn those genetically engineered kangaroos from Australia that overthrew humanity and spread that horrid mix of aussie-English and kangaroo noises…
Oops, I mean, it WOULD make it more difficult if there WERE time travelers. Of course there aren’t, that would be just bloody drongoo-eep-eep.
One thing about English is that words have to be recognized as part of the standard vocabulary. Aren’t there languages in which any construction that follows the rules is valid, even if it creates a word that’s never been used before? For example, if English allowed this you could have “coolth” as the opposite of “warmth” (e.g., “I really enjoy the coolth of my air conditioner”)
Another thing is that English has comparitively few words to describe one’s relatives. Brother-in-law can mean either your sister’s husband or your wife’s brother. I would imagine that strongly clan/tribe based societies get much more specific- “my father’s brother’s daughter’s husband” instead of “cousin in law”.
y’all isn’t necessarily plural. In Oklahoma, at least, y’all is actually used in addressing one person. If addressing multiple people “all y’all” is used. But then Okies also use “coke” as the general term instead of pop or soda. It is very common to hear the following conversation:
Waiter: What can I get you to drink?
Patron: I’ll have a coke.
Waiter: OK, what kind?
It’s missing a word for what makes you you–your soul/spirit/energy/essence. I never realized it until I took Latin, which has a word for such thing (animus).
There’s also some idea of a future event that’s used in Latin but not in English. I don’t remember what it’s called, but you have to translate it like “the horse about to look over the houses” not “the horse is about to look over the houses.” It always confused me.
Hindustani has different words for every specific type of relative. People in India traditionally live in great big extended-family households, so it helps them to know who they’re talking about by using specific kinship terms.
in-laws:
nand = husband’s sister or brother’s wife
sâlî = wife’s sister
jeThânî = husband’s older brother’s wife
deorânî = husband’s younger brother’s wife
bahinoî = sister’s husband
sâlâ = wife’s brother (Note: If you go to India or Pakistan, be careful not to use this word around anybody. It has a slang meaning as an obscene insult.)
jeTh = husband’s older brother
devar = husband’s younger brother
grandparents:
nânî = maternal grandmother
nânâ = maternal grandmother
dâdî = paternal grandmother
dâdâ = paternal grandfather
aunts & uncles:
khâlâ = mother’s sister
khâlû = mother’s sister’s husband
mâmûn = mother’s brother
mâmî = mother’s brother’s wife
phûphî = father’s sister
phûphâ = father’s sister’s husband
tâyâ = father’s older brother
tâyî = father’s older brother’s wife
cacâ (c pronounced as “ch”) = father’s younger brother
câcî = father’s younger brother’s wife
nieces & nephews:
bhânjî = sister-daughter (e.g. Éowyn)
bhânjâ = sister-son (Éomer)
bhatîjî = brother’s daughter
bhatîjâ = brother’s son
cousins: these terms are combinations of the words bahin ‘sister’ and bhâî ‘brother’ with the specific type of aunt or uncle. That’s why in Indian English they speak of “cousin-sisters” and “cousin-brothers” when they mean “cousins.”
khâlerî bahin, khâlerâ bhâî, mâmerî bahin, mâmerâ bhâî, phûpherî bahin, phûpherâ bhâî, tâyerî bahin, tâyerâ bhâî, cacerî bahin, cacerâ bhâî.
So you have 10 different types of cousin to memorize.
One thing I love from Japanese is the “suffering passive,” which certainly doesn’t exist in English. In general, the passive voice is much more commonly used in Japanese than English (this sentence notwithstanding!) - more on that here. But what’s really cool is that there’s an efficient way to express when something happens to you and you suffer by it. Let’s say that some hateful person sits down next to you on the bus. In Japanese, you can say, “Basu-de Jomo Mojo (;))-ni suwareta!” In English you’d have to say something like, “On the bus, that awful Jomo Mojo sat down next to me and I suffered.” Or you’d have to wear an expression of disgust while simply saying “On the bus [dramatic pause]…Jomo Mojo sat down next to me!”
Another huge difference is counting. In japanese, the word for a number changes depending on what it is you’re counting. The word for “one” is, in the abstract, “ichi,” and that’s the word you use if you see the number on a house, or you’re doing a math problem. But if you’re counting it mutates -
[ul][li]animals, fish, insects - ippiki[/li][li]birds - ichi-wa[/li][li]bound objects - issatsu[/li][li]boxes & cases - hito-hako[/li][li]buildings - ikken[/li][li]copies - ichi-bu[/li][li]cups or glassfuls - ippai[/li][li]flat, thin objects - ichi-mai[/li][li]floors of building - ikkai[/li][li]insects - ippiki[/li][li]long objects - ippon[/li][li]machines, vehicles - ichi-dai[/li][li]people - hitori[/li][li]round, lumpy or formless objects (apples, furniture )- hitotsu*[/li][li]slices - hito-kire[/li][li]other sm. objects (apples, toys) - ikko[/ul][/li]*Some sources don’t really consider this a “counter” - it’s the default option when nothing else fits or you’re not sure.
Oxymoron: Speaking of passive, Vietnamese has two passives: one for beneficial and one for detrimental verbs. IIRC, Japanese has three passives.
Tá brón orm a chara - I missed your post, which was very interesting and informative as always.
I agree this is useful. My baby nephew is named “Xavier” (pronounced as in Spanish, with the “x” as an “s”) and I am looking forward to teasing him by calling him “Conocier.”
My sister-in-law (from Guanajuato, Mexico) doesn’t think it’s funny though. Oh well.