Is it true that french is a much more sophisticated and elegant language than English?
nah
>>24781306That's not much of an achievement.
>>24781306yes
>>24781306All the Romance languages are.
>>24781306It's more sophisticated in the sense that it appeals to people that think of themselves as sophisticates. It is not more sophisticated in terms of the complexity or knowledge or culture it conveys. English displaced it as the Lingua Franca because it is more capable of expressing the technical as was required by the industrial revolution. I disagree that it's generally more elegant. When spoken by beautiful French women it does sound that way. When spoken by everyone else it's just kind of nasty and gay.
>>24781350>romanian is more sophisticated than English
>>24781358>English displaced it as the Lingua Franca because it is more capable of expressing the technical as was required by the industrial revolutionNo. English became popular because of the influence of America. Has nothing to do with the language itself.
>>24781358if it wasn't for the US then French or German would be the lingua franca today
>>24781366Yes.
>>24781306Not at all. The French are pornsick narcissists and they like to speak in a way that's aloofhttps://briarfray.org/t/french-psychology-thread/420?u=johnnymcivor
>>24781306Probably more precise, demonstrably less sophisticated than English but in a sense this is a strength. Joyce said something like âits a limited instrument but look at what they can do with it!â English is mixed in its origins which in a sense that makes it inferior as a medium of poetry.>>24781367Yes also the internet is American military technology
>>24781306French is throat cancer padded with superfluous characters; only Arabic, Hebrew and perhaps Chinese are more unpleasant to sound out
>>24781306French is a very frustrating language in many ways, but more sophisticated and elegant language than English? Absolutely.I consider English somewhat inelegant.
Idk what determines whether a language is elegant or not
>>24781501wait till you find out about german
Where do I start, continue and end with Julien Gracq?
>>24781368>If it wasn't for another group of Englishmen speaking English than less people would be speaking EnglishFantastic insight, anon, do you have a newsletter or Xitter account?
Moby Dick was written in English. Whatever these Baguette eating faggots have written, it certainly doesnât compare.
>>24781306It's better for being transphobic and sexists. So yes.
>>24781306Yes, but it's also a much less serious and imaginative language. They have no poet of the stature of Milton, no tragedians to speak.
>>24781306Every romance language is more complete and sophisticated than English.
Nah
>>24781350Borges explained on Firing Line why the opposite is true
>>24781829Borges said nothing about sophistication and elegance as far as I can remember. He said it was better for other reasons.
>>24781306I would like to speak French as a second language as way to exclude brown people from my conversations.Itâs a language spoken by enough people in this region, though mostly tourists from Quebec, where it would have some practical value, and there is historical context as well since there many French colonials here at one point too.I think German is a lot cooler but Iâd never have anyone to speak with and if I did theyâd just want to speak English.Russian is also cool but I think it would be impossible for me to learn
>>24781306I used some French in the first chapt of my novel and now I can't get an agent.
>>24781854>as way to exclude brown people from my conversations
>>24781854>>24781922Of all the languages kek.
>>24781799No necessarily
>>24781922To be fair, he said brown, not black. I'm sure anon loves black people! French is the blackest European language :)
>>24781366Romanian is probably the most sophisticated of all the Romance languages desu
>it's another episode of ESLs coping with their inability to grasp English spelling and pronunciation by claiming it's just too inelegant anyways
>>24781306>Is it true that [language] is a much more sophisticated and elegant language than [language]?No, for any two values of [language] and [language].
>>24781570Most Americans are not Englishmen, there are more Germans and Irishmen.
>>24782041It is objectively true that English has an overly large vowel inventory of the sort that is common in Germanic languages and a pants-on-head retarded orthography, and I say that as a native English speaker.
>>24781306If you want to say of all the time sure. If you want to use English loan words to have any kind of semblance of a modern conversation sure. If you want to convey in a paragraph what English does in a sentence sure. Ever wonder why Romance languages are spoken so fast? Because they have to speak that way in order for every conversation to not take 30 minutes.
>>24782060>five vowels and sometimes y is too much>can't use simple context clues to determine when to write to, two, or tooThat's all it takes to filter /lit/?
>>24782124>>five vowels and sometimes y is too muchThat's the orthography. The spoken English language has about 9 different monophtongs (bat, bot, bought, bet, bit, boot, put, but, beat).>>can't use simple context clues to determine when to write to, two, or tooI'm talking about shit like this:https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
>>24782060a flexible orthography lets it to absorb foreign words easily without forcing them into rigid spelling/pronunciation. probably a good thing for a global lingua franca.
>>24782161>Some random person's spitballing>>24782166Elaborate. How exactly does it do that? Because English still adapts foreign words into its own phonology, every language does that.
>>24782131>oh geez you mean vowels can be combined to make new sounds? That's too much>I'm talking about shit like thisThe English vocabulary has tens of thousands of words, having to remember a few hundred odd ducks is not a big ask. Fun poem, btw, I haven't seen it before.
>>24782174>>oh geez you mean vowels can be combined to make new sounds? That's too muchLanguage is composed of sounds, not letters. Writing is to language as musical notation is to music. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (a more precise sort of notation), the sounds I'm referring to are /É ĂŠ É J i É u Ê Ê/. That is way more vowel phonemes than basically any other language. (And that's American English, something like Australian English is even worse!)>The English vocabulary has tens of thousands of words, having to remember a few hundred odd ducks is not a big ask.Flesch and Rosenfelder both estimated English orthography is only about 85% regular. The entire concept of spelling bees seems utterly insane to most of the world.
>>24782182The J should be a small caps I, I don't know why 4chan does this.
French is monotonous at length but quippy if used sparingly
>>24782168english can take âcroissantâ or âphoâ and let people approximate the original sound without breaking the rules. in other systems the word would have to fit the existing phonotactics exactly.>Some random person's spitballingyou can say that about just about everything.
>>24782187Loanwords in English do not generally violate English phonotactics, cf. the schwa in "Knesset".>you can say that about just about everything.Not really? There's no attribution, and the original author gives no evidence for their claims.
>>24782190the point is english allows more variation without being âwrongâ. take spanish; football becomes futbol.>There's no attributionone robert graves. and he does offer a point of comparison in the academie.
>>24782202If you don't respell loanwords all it really accomplishes is that now you have to learn the orthographies of a dozen other languages just to know how to pronounce every word in your own language. What's the advantage of that? If you're writing in English, why shouldn't you follow the English convention for recording the sounds that are in your utterance?
>>24781306Yes. For centuries it was THE language to learn for the elites.
>>24782207prioritises flexible comprehension.
>>24782219How, exactly, does it do that?
>>24782222doesnât force a single standard.
>>24782228No, instead it puts far more burden on readers by making them learn multiple standards (not to mention a bunch of exceptions to the main one).
>>24782232which circles back to what RG said in >>24782161the english method tends to ambiguity and obscurity of expression; the (say) french, to limitation of thought.
>>24782237But the French also frequently keep the spelling of loanwords.
>>24781306Its not Anglo, and therefore irrelevant. Nothing else about it matters in any conversation between the two, as Anglos are the eternal World Protagonists and everyone else unironically doesn't matter. Simple as.
>>24782241with a different (single) pronunciation.
>>24782244...are you suggesting loanwords into English never change their pronunciation from the original language? Or that other languages never have variant forms of a single loanword?
>>24782211Also coincidentally the worst centuries for European literature.
>>24782255just that english is unusually tolerant. you donât have to match a single âcorrectâ form to understand a word.
>>24782259Words have multiple variant forms in many languages.
>>24782262most other languages mark deviations from the standard as âwrongâ or informal.
>>24782263And English doesn't? "Ain't" or "finna" will still get a "non-standard" note in dictionaries.
>>24782265talking about loanwords not slang.
>>24782270You think /ËhÉlÉËpinjoÊ/ for jalapeño won't get marked in a dictionary as more correct than /dÊÉËlĂŠpÉnoÊ/?
>>24782270>>24782277Also "ain't" and "finna" are dialect, not slang. Dialect is forms of language used in a certain region or by a certain social class, slang is certain ephemeral expressions used informally.
>>24782277dictionaries record usage.>>24782279splitting hairs about terminology, but still misses my point. there is no simple, correct english, but only innumerable precedents of arguable validity.
>>24782284That's... true of every language? Language is a social convention.
>>24782291in french, the academy recognises no more than one way of writing/speaking the language: câest a dire, correctement.
>>24782296And the Academy has no power over what the French language actually is, any more than King Canute could order around the tides.
>>24782299in the last century the severe control by the academy tempted anti-academic writers to acts of sabotage.itâs a prescriptive standard. english has no such body.
>>24781367Doesn't English have like the most actual words? I've had like at least 5 different words in English translated to Dutch as "ambiguous".>>24781854>I would like to speak French as a second language as way to exclude brown people from my conversations.This is hilarious roflcopter I actually refused to learn French in school because all the black and brown would exclusively speak it and I didn't want to be associated with them or know what they were saying desu
>>24782308>Doesn't English have like the most actual words?Basically impossible to meaningfully measure.
>>24782326dictionaries give rough estimates.
>>24782333But then it just depends on their criteria for what words to include, what counts as a separate word, etc.
>>24782347they generally go by base words. the biggest french dictionary has 120000 words, the OED has 600000.
>>24782057That's a load of bollocks
>>24782460I'm just going by the statistics.
>>24782460you are, statistically speaking, more likely to be related to a jungle nigger than an englishman
>>24781570>Americans>another group of EnglishmenThe majority of Americans are literally non-white lmao
>>24782308>Doesn't English have like the most actual words?That's Greek
>>24782359Again, still a lot of wiggle room for different criteria and definitions.>>24783079If you define "Greek" as including every work from Homer on down even if it's completely incomprehensible to a modern speaker without prior study, maybe. But that's like including everything from the Roman Kingdom on down as Italian.
>>24783934youâd need huge differences in criteria to turn 120,000 into 600,000.
>>24781306>Is it true that french is a much more sophisticated and elegant language than English?God no. Have you ever heard French spoken in person? It sounds like they're trying to speak English with a dick in their mouth.
>>24781306When men say this, they're referring to the cold mathematical qualities of a language such as cases and gender. French is 'sophisticated' because it has le chairs and la faggots or something
France seems like it has better writers. I wouldn't know since I only know English and can only read translations.
English has like 800,000 words, French only has 135,000. You can't be as sophisticated with French
>>24781306How do I say this janky shit in french?>The victim in question was Mr Smith, whom was murdered by his ten year old daughter.Whom between a preposition and question mark sounds natural, but as shown here if it's used before a verb it ruins the flow of the sentence.
>>24782308I think English is fairly well known for having many different ways to say the same thing, and of the languages I've been exposed to it has a stronger stylistic expectation among native speakers not to repeat words too close together unless absolutely necessary.
>>24784862Learn FrenchDownload French for Reading by Karl Sandberg and you can also read Le Français Par La Méthode Nature for supplementary inputUse anki to drill vocabulary Everyone on /lit/ should study at least one language to the point where they can fluently engage with that language's literature and French is one of if not the best languages to choose
