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What’s beautiful about English? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5454 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 17 of 34 28 May 2011 at 2:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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English is flexible, but you can't just toss the words around, and there are certainly many words you can't omit
without making the sentence grammatically incorrect.
No, they only need a single word: Yes. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| galindo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5208 days ago 142 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Portuguese | Message 18 of 34 28 May 2011 at 3:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
You would probably love Japanese, then. A single verb is enough to make a sentence, no pronouns required! "I'm going" and "We're going" would both just be "going." You don't need 'it' either. "Do you want it?" = "Want?" As for flexibility, the grammatical particles that mark the function of words let you switch things around/omit things more than you can in English. Oh, I should probably add what I find beautiful about English. I like the way it looks when written. The average word length seems shorter than many languages, and the sentences look more concise. When I look at a multilingual pamphlet, the English section usually takes up less space than other European languages. I also love the way words are spelled and would hate to see it reformed to be more phonetic. One thing I don't like (although this applies to many languages) is that the wide variety of possible sound combinations means that some combinations don't sound nice, so there are "ugly" words and "beautiful" words. (Of course, the meaning of the words also affects how they are perceived, but the sound matters a lot.) I notice this in some poetry and songs, where common words that would work perfectly are substituted for less common synonyms that sound prettier. I guess you could say that it's nice that there are certain words that stand out as particularly lovely, but it limits your choice of words when you are trying to write something beautiful, especially if an ugly word doesn't have any good synonyms. Edited by galindo on 28 May 2011 at 3:49pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6273 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 19 of 34 29 May 2011 at 6:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Any language can be "beautiful" or "ugly". Russian, for example, can be the former when a
Pushkin poem is being recited, and the latter when Moscow drunks are squabbling with each other and bellowing obscenities. And yet it is the same language. English, in its various forms, possesses quite a wide range of sounds and a huge vocabulary, and given the particular context and the speakers, it too can be either "beautiful" or "ugly". 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Matheus Senior Member Brazil Joined 5082 days ago 208 posts - 312 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, French | Message 20 of 34 29 May 2011 at 8:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Haha, I was going to say that, then I read your post.
You can do that with Portuguese too, but not always. I think Japanese is more flexible to that, but we almost always omit personal pronouns. Do you want it? - Quer? I do - "Sim" or "Quero" I liked it - Gostei. I went there - Fui lá Did she like it? - Ela gostou? Yes,she did - "Sim" or "Gostou" Did you like it? - Gostou? Did you guys like it? - Gostaram? Edited by Matheus on 29 May 2011 at 8:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| varjakpaul Newbie United States Joined 4929 days ago 22 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Spanish, Mandarin, Persian | Message 21 of 34 30 May 2011 at 4:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Native English speaker here. But I have a friend from Brazil who thinks the English word 'breakfast' was just soooooo beautiful as compared to his Portuguese word for that meal. (I never considered breakfast much of a beautiful word; it's kind of wooden or ... anyway, it's more literal, in that we break the fast.)
My own answer was going to be Shakespeare to e.e. cummings. And the flexibility. The irregular verbs and spellings don't matter to me much, because I learned them growing up. Most of them. And I acknowledge the "no language is more beautiful than another" line of thought, even though I don't agree with it; because it is okay to hold personal opinions. So did a linguistics prof I had in grad school - but he also admitted he thought Portuguese was the language of the angels (despite the word breakfast, I guess). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Matheus Senior Member Brazil Joined 5082 days ago 208 posts - 312 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, French | Message 22 of 34 31 May 2011 at 12:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||
My personal opinion is that the language of the angels is Japanese when it's spoken by a women. I always get run over by a truck of cuteness when I hear them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5416 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 23 of 34 31 May 2011 at 12:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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^ As long as they're not singing kabuki.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| JGR Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4938 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian, French, Japanese | Message 24 of 34 06 June 2011 at 12:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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English is somewhat of an interesting one as languages go.
It's been cobbled together out of dozens of other languages and because of that is quite vocabulary/syntax rich and flexible. You can make just about anything read/sound aesthetically pleasing with a little effort and care. On the downside it can also be very illogical, clunky and unnecessarily complicated or verbose. Some of the spellings are just horrendous. The "ough" combination is a good example of that at its finest. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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