>Old English lit > English lit>Old Norse lit > Nordic languages lit>Old Spanish lit > Spanish litWhy older languages tend to be more rich and expresive, where their authors just better because they were and that's it or is there more to it
>>25333213You can't even read old English
>>25333213This shit just isn't true. Especially not for Spanish. Norse, maybe.
>>25333224>not for Spanishlmao at you, panchito
>>25333223You could read Middle English, the point still stands
Performative male thread
>>25333235Only a select few middle english
>>25333233You don't really think La Celestina is a masterwork, do you?
>>25333290I do think Jorge Manrique or el Libro del Buen Amor, for example, mogs your realismo selvático or whatever
Older languages were more elegant, compact and efficient. They had more complex inflection so they could use fewer words to express the same meaning.
>>25333300
>>25333213It's “more rich and expressive” because next to nothing survived, even so we were a housefire close to losing Beowulf for good. Perhaps it's superior because you have access to a corpus selected and pruned over centuries, versus a billion books published a year by bored housewives, bourgeois posters and Asian expartriates. You might moderate your judgement if all that was left of English literature were Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden and Johnson.
>>25333239Just be quiet dude youre made for BAC
>>25333549>because next to nothing survivedHow lucky we are that the gems survived and not the shit!How lucky we are that the gems survived and not the shit!You're implying much considering the censorship and randomness of time purging [good or bad]books
>Why older languages tend to be more rich and expressiveLess words mean you have to talk longer to get to the fucking point.
>>25334682With less abstract concepts to use they were also more clever on displaying their emotions and arguments so it begs the question, I think, should we trim our langauges from time to time? As in getting rid of ancient laws no longer in use, do the same for words, barbarisms, expressions and so on
>>25333213The authors lived slower paced lives and their ideas were more closely connected to cultural traditions. Every storytelling convention, trope and symbol, come from something passed down from the past. The modern age onwards is an explosive mashup of world culture combined with an implosion of conservative religious tradition, creating stories with varying degrees of symbolic derivation from comprehensible, transmissible culture, uprooted from the permanence and stolidity of ancient literature.
