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Ciao. I'm a student of Italian philology, and I do find your comment interesting for obvious reasons. I also speak English very fluently. I find English to b

by gkya 11y ago

Ciao. I'm a student of Italian philology, and I do find your comment interesting for obvious reasons. I also speak English very fluently. I find English to be a dumbed down language, and reading long and complex sentences in it gives me unbearable pain, with about every grammatical function contained in different words spread all over the sentence, and little to no clue for what's linked with what. I never read literature in English because it is incomprehensible (even tho I easily read technical stuff in it). And I can't stand English pronunciation. Italian on the other hand offers nice possibilities for prefixes and suffixed that modify a word's meaning, allowing for deriving new words rather easily. The noun-gender system and verb conjugation allows for more complex sentences to be built more fluently and pleasingly, without compromising legibility. Vowels are actual vowels. Italian has a small set of simple and nice sounds, whereas English has upwards of 40 different sounds you need to learn in order to speak near-native. And Italian sounds just cool and lovely. I don't know how you can think that English is more flexible and more expressive. All that makes English feasible is the fact that it's spoken in the US.

douche 11y ago
English is the Microsoft of languages. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Part of the insanity of English grammar and spelling is that it's a weird polyglot mashup of Old English/Frisian, Norse, French, Latin, Greek, and then whatever random bits of a hundred other languages. This flexibility is also a strength, in comparison to more ossified and standardized languages. To borrow another software analogy, English is the bazaar. On a completely different front, gendering sexless nouns is just silly, as an English-native speaker. At least German mostly puts things that don't have an actual gender as neuter.
- gkya 11y ago
  The one argument I'm aware of about grammatical gender is that found in the prologue of the second edition (1858) of the work titled De l'origine du langue of Ernest Renan, which holds that it may have originated in what I'll call sexual dialects, which diverge because of little intersexual social contact, and words most used by females become feminine, and those most used by males become masculine. He cites that in Indian dramas men speak Sanskrit and female Femprakrit, though I couldn't find anything about the latter. He also writes, little before this, that the older the language, the more apparent the grammatical gender, because of the instinct of ancient peoples to attach sexual identity to even the inanimate. The more modern the language, the lesser the effect of grammatical gender. He cites indeed English for being the most simplified in this respect. Grammatical gender is not merely about masculinity or femminility of words. For example, "giornata" is a femminine italian word meaning "the part of the day from morning to the evening", derived from "giorno", a masculine word which means "daytime, (whole) day (i.e. 24 hours). This is a feature of femminine past participle, which carries the meaning of quickness, something that happens at a certain time, a hit (testata: headbutt) etc.
vixen99 11y ago
As you say, English is a dumbed-down language which is exactly why it has become the language of science and not any of the inflected languages such as German (which used to be, certainly the language of chemistry), Italian or Spanish etc., In English, prepositions and auxiliary verbs make explicit the ideas in a statement. This is not an especial advantage in literary works but in terms of precise communication it's a winner. For a detailed discussion I recommend 'The language of science from the fall of Latin to the rise of English - Scientific Babel' by Michael D. Gordin. As for very great literature, the English have Shakespeare (sadly unread by you) but you have Dante (sadly unread by me). I mean in the original!

by gkya 11y ago

douche 11y ago

English is the Microsoft of languages. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Part of the insanity of English grammar and spelling is that it's a weird polyglot mashup of Old English/Frisian, Norse, French, Latin, Greek, and then whatever random bits of a hundred other languages. This flexibility is also a strength, in comparison to more ossified and standardized languages. To borrow another software analogy, English is the bazaar. On a completely different front, gendering sexless nouns is just silly, as an English-native speaker. At least German mostly puts things that don't have an actual gender as neuter.

gkya 11y ago
The one argument I'm aware of about grammatical gender is that found in the prologue of the second edition (1858) of the work titled De l'origine du langue of Ernest Renan, which holds that it may have originated in what I'll call sexual dialects, which diverge because of little intersexual social contact, and words most used by females become feminine, and those most used by males become masculine. He cites that in Indian dramas men speak Sanskrit and female Femprakrit, though I couldn't find anything about the latter. He also writes, little before this, that the older the language, the more apparent the grammatical gender, because of the instinct of ancient peoples to attach sexual identity to even the inanimate. The more modern the language, the lesser the effect of grammatical gender. He cites indeed English for being the most simplified in this respect. Grammatical gender is not merely about masculinity or femminility of words. For example, "giornata" is a femminine italian word meaning "the part of the day from morning to the evening", derived from "giorno", a masculine word which means "daytime, (whole) day (i.e. 24 hours). This is a feature of femminine past participle, which carries the meaning of quickness, something that happens at a certain time, a hit (testata: headbutt) etc.

vixen99 11y ago

As you say, English is a dumbed-down language which is exactly why it has become the language of science and not any of the inflected languages such as German (which used to be, certainly the language of chemistry), Italian or Spanish etc., In English, prepositions and auxiliary verbs make explicit the ideas in a statement. This is not an especial advantage in literary works but in terms of precise communication it's a winner. For a detailed discussion I recommend 'The language of science from the fall of Latin to the rise of English - Scientific Babel' by Michael D. Gordin. As for very great literature, the English have Shakespeare (sadly unread by you) but you have Dante (sadly unread by me). I mean in the original!