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What’s beautiful about English? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5829 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 1 of 34 26 May 2011 at 11:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This isn't meant to be an incendiary question, it's just born out of curiosity. I was discussing with my monolingual
boyfriend how each language has unique features and a unique "feel" to it, and he wanted to know what features of English non-native speakers find particularly striking and beautiful. It's an interesting question to me because I feel very differently about English, my native language, than I do about Esperanto or Japanese or French. I think it's hard as a native speaker to figure out what's special about English because it just seems "normal" to me, like it's the default. I feel this less strongly now that I know other languages fairly well, but it's still hard to see English's features as an insider. So I'd like to ask the second-language learners of English on this board what you like about it and how it compares to other languages. What do you find most unique and beautiful about English? Is there anything you feel you can only truly express in this language and no other? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 2 of 34 27 May 2011 at 12:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
I truly believe that Achewood would be nigh impossible in any other language. The sheer breadth of English, the volume of words and expressions, lacks a match in any other language I've encountered, except for maybe the Saam Kap Dai style of writing in Hong Kong stories, where the author uses Classical Chinese, Standard Chinese and Cantonese to achieve a great breadth of register. That's what English is like to me. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Dragomanno Triglot Groupie Zimbabwe Joined 5004 days ago 80 posts - 98 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2, GermanB2 Studies: Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Latin, Lithuanian, Albanian, Ancient Greek | Message 3 of 34 27 May 2011 at 4:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Apart from its usefulness, some of the best poems and songs ever have been written in this language, that's why it lures me. I could hardly imagine E. A. Poe's "The Crow" or a song like "Starway to Heaven" in a language other than English. Edited by Dragomanno on 27 May 2011 at 4:28pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| akprocks Senior Member United States Joined 5287 days ago 178 posts - 258 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 4 of 34 27 May 2011 at 4:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm a native speaker but I love how I can use a Germanic based word or a Romance derived word to describe the same thing. For example I can 'help' someone or I can 'aid' someone, I can 'heal' or I can 'cure'. You can only truly appreciate this after a good dose of Old English. Edited by akprocks on 27 May 2011 at 4:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5010 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 5 of 34 27 May 2011 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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First beauty of the language I found years ago is it's relative "simpleness". To many people it takes much less time to get to communicative level (not talking about some high level and perfection, just the level to make yourself understood) of English than of other languages and I find this beautiful and it's one of the reasons why it's so widely spoken.
But a more linguistic beauty. Tolkien. Those books are wonderful not only with the stories, they are beautiful both seen on the paper and read out loud, the language is not simple, it's rich, deep, creative, meaningful, demanding of the reader (for sure for a language learner or a native child, as Tolkien himself spoke of in one of his essays). And another exemple of the beauty are songs by Simon and Garfungel. I find the lyrics beautiful in both their content and form. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| pj1991 Newbie United States Joined 4954 days ago 29 posts - 49 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 6 of 34 27 May 2011 at 9:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't want to hijack the thread, but I'd also be interested to hear if there's anything you particularly don't like or find beautiful about English as well.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5454 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 7 of 34 27 May 2011 at 9:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm sorry to say, but I've never thought of English as a beautiful language. I do like English though. It's expressive and useful.
I don't like the spelling. I'm not too fond of how it sounds either, especially certain American, Australian and Indian accents. Edited by tractor on 27 May 2011 at 9:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| slav Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5008 days ago 43 posts - 54 votes Speaks: Slovak, Czech*, English* Studies: Spanish, Swedish | Message 8 of 34 27 May 2011 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, no matter what language you're talking about, it can be beautiful or ugly at any given moment, depending on how it's being presented. There's no absolute pretty or absolute ugly languages, although most lean to one or another.
I actually don't think English is pretty, to be honest... I learned it because I moved to the US when I was 6 and had no choice. I don't like how words are spelled. It's not phonetic whatsoever, at all. If English was typed out phonetically, it might look better. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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