M'sieur 'arrycastle !
Many languages of Europe 'ave a form using "have+participle"; however, the exact usage is different. Using this form with "since", 'how long" and "for" to indicate a period up to the present is, it is true, very English.

@HS Yes indeed. I am mighty curious as to how you arrive at your own point of view.

@AnWulf English spelling just grew like topsy and lacks a close-knit underpinning framework. Attempts to tidy it up mostly failed. For practical purposes using the right spell-checker is for non-native speakers the best option. However, my own email-spell-checker is stuck in Hungarian and despite googling around, I still can't find the button to change it back to English!

My earlier remarks about the number of English-speakers on the Indian sub-continent did not quite hit middle stump. Assuming that around four percent of the adult pop speak English fluently (as appears to be the case in India) we have a fluent English-speakers numbering around 25 million. According to Wikipedia English is still the offical language in Pakistan, used in court proceedings and all official documents. So still quite a sizeable dialect with its own newspapers and literature.

For those interested in speaking proper:

The Queen's Hinglish: How to Speak Pukka .. published by Harper Collins

And I have found there is a page in wikipedia under "Indian English" which provides technical details.
Still looking for a more extensive online listing of word usage differences, which would be handy indeed.
So, co-brothers, although I am not quite yet a stadium, I am feeling glassy and must airdash; so I cannot prepone our next timepass; do hope you will not think me a badmash.

Re mouse/mice: a few nouns in English still use the Germanic umlaut/ablaut system to show plurals, like man/men, goose/geese, foot/feet. Mouse belongs here.
There are also a few nouns which are "weak" and take an -en for the plural - oxen,children, brethren (and dialect housen), and several animals which are unchanging - deer, sheep in modern English.
No reason to use mouses any more than hice.

@WW I think wot this shews is that the suffix -ful is pretty much portable almost like an inflection, provided of course the result is meaning-ful.
Looks like the spelling follows the French pattern.

@Anwulf re "progress" : yes you are right. However for my goals (ESOL), I need to teach the meaning of "pro" and "gress" as building blocks toward con-gress, ag-gress-ive, grade, a-gree, pro-pose, pro-fess, pro-ceed and so on. Basically teaching Latin I guess. A bit like us learning: выбор сбор

I found "thole", the English version of "tolerate".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ulsterscots/words/thole

This might have given us:
"untholing" = intolerant or impatient
"patient" = tholer/tholing
??