/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16243341]

any other ESLs here who feel like English is too "dry" for literature and that the language makes it feel like writers are building something with lego or something. it's choppy and there is no "malleability', a bunch of blocks with no movement

[Anonymous No.16243354]

>>16243341
>lego
Isn't this just how a language would feel as you're learning it? I don't think a French class is going to feel any more like an art elective than a German class is.

[Anonymous No.16243547]

>>16243354
you could have picked any two languages but those one's are literally the counterpoint to your claim

[Anonymous No.16243565]

Yes, it's too simple for complex text. And to think it's all what some people know...what a tragedy. Their inner voice hasn't fully developed.

[Anonymous No.16243735]

>>16243341
You mean something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language

[Anonymous No.16243761]

>>16243735
yes sir, Mandarin is even more analytic than English

[Anonymous No.16243780]

>>16243341
no. that's just because you're an esl.

[Anonymous No.16243795]

>>16243565
write the same post in a different language, you nigger.

[Anonymous No.16243799]

>>16243780
monolinguoids have no capacity to engage in this discussion. it's like talking about calculus to a guy who can't even multiply

[Anonymous No.16243802]

>>16243341
Not at all, but I get something similar to this with some British lit, particularly Victorian/Edwardian lit.

[Anonymous No.16243804]

>>16243341
idc I don't think there's too much a real difference in experience but Borges hyped English so but idk if that was just generational thing

[Anonymous No.16244061]

brainlet here. How does Latin compare?

[Anonymous No.16244151]

>>16243799
Not that poster but uncultured of you to not understand that there exists regions with naive English speakers also native in other languages.
> t. Gaeltacht anon

[Anonymous No.16244503]

I actually think it flows very nicely

[Anonymous No.16244519]

I feel that way about French. Feels like the language itself has no variety to it, so the author is forced to vary things up at the rhetorical or stylistic level instead of the grammatical and syntactical. And then it feels forced and affected.

[Anonymous No.16244572]

>>16243804
borges only liked english because, as is the case with all argentinians, he hated himself for not being european or american. sad sad people

[Anonymous No.16244593]

>>16243735
Is this why the french have such rubbish philosophy?

[Anonymous No.16245386]

>>16244572
lol

[Anonymous No.16245664]

>>16243341
You're probably just not very good at speaking it

[Anonymous No.16245943]

>>16243341
All you have to do to get English wet is stick some foreign grammar or lexicon inside her and she juices up from when Norse and Danish and French and Latin raped her until she leaked shit.

[Anonymous No.16246059]

Sounds like continental cope.

[Anonymous No.16246086]

>>16243341
Nah, I prefer it to German, Russian or Spanish. Besides the focus on language when writing is misplaced. It’s all about the story, my nigga.

[Anonymous No.16247232]

>>16243341
nope, you just don't know the language well enough

[Anonymous No.16247499]

>>16244593
Awesome philosophy*
Ftfy

[Anonymous No.16247637]

>>16247232
non-sequitur

[Anonymous No.16247672]

>>16245664
Anglo monolinguals will keep using this graph because of their affirmation bias but I know you'd throw this graph in the trash and disregard the measured quantities as "not representitive of a whole language" when it turns out some obscure African/NA language has higher info density.

[Anonymous No.16247750]

Yes but I have been developing a form of pictographic language based on traditional Chinese, similar to kanji. Since English is such an analytic language it is actually quite elegant and adds a layer of cultural sophistication for the language.

[Anonymous No.16247766]

>>16247672
Are they though? Besides even if they are, shit is not viable for communication when it's so niche.

Though I wonder why Russian isn't in the chart, it seems similar enough to English when it comes to stealing from other languages, which could help making it more efficient.

[Anonymous No.16247803]

>>16247750
“At 2o’clock I went to the store to buy some carrots and three pounds of sugar. Everyone was wearing masks.”
See how elegant it is? If English ever wants to be a truly literary language it needs to adopt some kind of kanji system.

[Anonymous No.16247825]

>>16247750
>>16247803
It also solves the problem of calligraphy, which is of course that calligraphy sucks when it’s done with a Latin alphabet. There is not a single notable calligraphic tradition that exists using the Latin alphabet, and that’s no surprise since Latin was invented by a bunch of primitive craftsmen scratching notes into bits of metal or rock, unlike most alphabets which where developed by people with access to ink and paper.

[Anonymous No.16247847]

>>16247803
lol just convert the whole thing then
二時 私 行 [past] to the 店 to 買 some 人参 and 三 pounds of 砂糖。皆 was 着 [-ing] 仮面 [s]

[Anonymous No.16247900]

>>16247803
>>16247847
*二時 私 行了 to the 店 to 買 Σ 人参 ^ 三 pounds of 砂糖。皆 was 着在 仮面

了 = completed action
在 = action in progress
from chinese

[Anonymous No.16247985]

>>16244151
>got blown the fuck out by a gay furry

[Anonymous No.16248019]

I disagree. English is mostly analytic, but has stolen enough from other languages to also be fairly synthetic and effective. I'd hold up Moby Dick as an example of the language's synthetic abilities and potential for beautiful prose.

[Anonymous No.16248068]

>>16243341
>Chromos, Felipe Alfau
Best opening line/pages of a novel in the 20th century and deals with this specifically

[Anonymous No.16248074]

>>16247672
The study wasn't even done by Anglos

[Anonymous No.16248087]

>>16243341
Yes, it's because english relies on helper words to convey the same idea that other languages can by modifying the base word. Take "eat", italian: "mangiare", romanian: "a mănca"
If we want to turn this into "We eat" we just add "we" but for the other two we change the base word to "mangiamo" and "mâncăm".
This give the language a more fluid and adaptable feel.

[Anonymous No.16248099]

>>16243341
The language itself isn't dry, in my opinion. It's mostly that our contemporary stylistic zeitgeist lends to itself a tersity of prose. Thanks Hemingway. There is a certain kind of inelegance or even brutality to the English language though. For the most part we speak and write in hard edged consonants without the musicality of a total language or the fricatives of a romance language, but this doesn't mean that English is an artless language, or that we're confined to these dynamics. The greatest strength of the English language is how freely it borrows from other languages. We don't just have loaner words, we have their derivatives as well, and as English writers we have the freedom to play in the spaces between.

I'm biased since English is my native language, but I really love it. I never feel constrained by it. Granted, we don't have specific words for a lot of concepts like you see in German, for instance. But personally, that's not a big deal for me, since when I'm talking about something I tend to want to address its intricacies rather than just referencing it.

[Anonymous No.16248103]

>>16248087
"We eat" in Italian is "noi mangiamo", though?

[Anonymous No.16248114]

>>16243565
Sì, è troppo semplice per testi complessi. E pensare che è tutto ciò che alcune persone conoscono... che tragedia. La loro voce interiore non si è sviluppata appieno.

L'italiano, per inciso, è la più ricca lingua del pianeta.

[Anonymous No.16248116]

>>16243795
Sì, è troppo semplice per testi complessi. E pensare che è tutto ciò che alcune persone conoscono... che tragedia. La loro voce interiore non si è sviluppata appieno.

L'italiano, per inciso, è la più ricca lingua del pianeta.

[Anonymous No.16248122]

>>16248103
Uncultured swine, in italian the subject is often implied. "Mangiamo" is a full sentence.

[Anonymous No.16248135]

>>16243795
>Vskutku, angličtina je jazykem moc jednoduchým pro komplexní text. Pomyslete, on je to jediný jazyk, jenž někteří jedinci ovládají. Jaká to tragédie! Jejich vnitřní hlas nebyl úplně vyvinut.
Modern english is language of niggers and nigger lovers. Language so twisted and malformed even the most inbred pakistani lomdoners can speak it. However to seek in it genius to compose poetry or write prose? Madness! There's no artistry to be found in such a language.

[Anonymous No.16248162]

>>16248116
Non vedo cosa intendi a dire. Non sono quel anon, ma nonostante non sono sicuro che c'è in italiano che lo renda una lingua superiore all'inglese.

[Anonymous No.16248177]

>>16243341
Your native language is probably synthetic. People that go in the other direction (analytic -> synthetic) often find synthetic languages stilted and arbitrary.

[Anonymous No.16248179]

[Anonymous No.16248201]

Serb here. English is one of the best languages in the world.

[Anonymous No.16248238]

>>16248114
>>16248116
English is a plebfilter then. Only the best writers can write well in English. Any dumb monkey can start writing in Italian and it'll sound great.

[Anonymous No.16248247]

>>16248238
Yeah, this is a really good point. Some languages have an inherent beauty to them, and English definitely isn't one of them. That doesn't mean that English is an ugly language, it just means that colloquial English is ugly.

[Anonymous No.16248325]

>>16248201
You forgot the punchline. Because it isn't Croat.

[Anonymous No.16248363]

>>16243341
Yeah I mean the difference is staggering, just read Proust in English vs basically any romance language. It’s ridiculously horrible, absolutely no poetry in the english language. Reading poetry in english feels like reading a shopping, it’s not real poetry at all

[Anonymous No.16248379]

>>16247766
You're literally proving my point.
I'm saying they'll backtrack and include some different measure, for example, "popularity" or "relevance" and say something like "oh info density isn't the only thing that's relevant it's also how many people speak it". Sound familiar?

>>16248074
It's not about who did the study it's about who's using the study to satiate their affirmation bias.

[Anonymous No.16248411]

>>16248325

[Anonymous No.16248536]

>>16248379
>satiate their affirmation bias.
I've only ever seen it used defensively against retards shitting on one of the world's great languages

[Anonymous No.16248560]

>>16248411
Dude. Serbian *is* Croat.

[Anonymous No.16248688]

>>16243795
Ja, es ist eine viel zu simple Sprache für komplexere Texte. Wenn man dann noch darüber nachdenkt dass es die einzige Sprache ist die manche beherschen ... was eine Tragödie. Ihre innere Stimme hat sich noch nicht völlig entwickelt.

[Anonymous No.16249143]

>>16248560
I agree. Serbian, Croatian, Montenegroian amd Bosnian are all the same thing. Just as people don't say American or Australian.

[Anonymous No.16249225]

>>16243341
I take it you don’t read German or Dutch. But no English is actually quite expressive as it has so many words. It is a good language for intuitive expression of emotions and therefore it suits poetry.

[Anonymous No.16250108]

>>16248363
this language was a mistake

[Anonymous No.16250567]

>>16247847
>>16247900
Very nice, I like it