English the best language?

1stimpressions

Hope this is allowed in this forum. I am looking for an essay or commentary I studied in college and cannot seem to find. It argues over the superiority of the English language in comparison to other languages (possibly French and German) as regards expression. If anyone could help me out or point me in a direction to stuff similar to this argument I would be grateful.

Does anyone who has studied many languages believe English to be a superior language of communication because of its large vocabulary or any other reason?

sceptre

Moved to the English forum from Literature.

koganei12

I certainly do not think English is in anyway superior to other languages. All languages are equal and to say otherwise is a horrible form of prejudice and ethnocentrism. It implies that English speakers brains somehow have greater ability for thought and thus greater need for expression than other speakers' brains. It's ridiculous. If indeed there are more words in English than some other languages (and I'm not saying there are), these are solely words for concrete nouns for things that have been discovered first in the English speaking world. That doesn't mean the language is superior, it just means that English happened to be the first to give a name to it and most likely other languages just adopted that word. As far as expressiveness goes, for any nuance in English that is difficult to express in another language there is an expression in any other one of those languages which is equally difficult to express in English.

And I have studied Swedish, Japanese, French, Spanish, Irish, Dutch and German.

deman

I think that the only advantage English might have over other languages is in the "creative writing" area. Most skilled writers do not like using the same word again in the same paragraph. The diversity of the English language allows for this because of the huge amount of synonyms that other languages sometimes lack in. This does not however make English superior. It just show what a bastardised language it is when it borrowed words from so many other languages through the centuries.

MathsManiac

Deleted.

Realised I referenced the wrong book. Sorry!

pickarooney

English has a much greater number and variety of words than pretty much any other language which I think gives it an advantage in many areas of expression. How widespread the language is (as opposed to having a large number of speakers concentrated in one area) has resulted in English incorporating other languages piecemeal and produced multiple strains of the language, each of which has its own peculiarities.

A language is a reflection of the people who speak it and it's hard to argue that a language whose speakers number in the hundreds of billions and live in all corners of the globe is not more expressive because of this.

koganei12

deman wrote: »

I think that the only advantage English might have over other languages is in the "creative writing" area. Most skilled writers do not like using the same word again in the same paragraph. The diversity of the English language allows for this because of the huge amount of synonyms that other languages sometimes lack in. This does not however make English superior. It just show what a bastardised language it is when it borrowed words from so many other languages through the centuries.

I assure you, there is no shortage of synonyms in any language I have ever studied. People who don't speak another language often think there own one has more words than others do. That's just because there not good enough at the other languages to know the synonyms. I've met Spanish and French people who told me they thought the same about their own languages, they thought English was deprived of words, at which point I readily reamed off about a dozen synonyms they didn't know for pretty basic words they thought they'd mastered. Arrogance is international it would seem.

im invisible

Its 'Deja vu' all over again

pickarooney

koganei12 wrote: »

I assure you, there is no shortage of synonyms in any language I have ever studied. People who don't speak another language often think there own one has more words than others do. That's just because there not good enough at the other languages to know the synonyms. I've met Spanish and French people who told me they thought the same about their own languages, they thought English was deprived of words, at which point I readily reamed off about a dozen synonyms they didn't know for pretty basic words they thought they'd mastered. Arrogance is international it would seem.

It's nothing to do with arrogance; it's an indisputable fact that some languages have larger word bases than others. Give me 62 synonyms for 'drunk' in Pite Sami off the top of your head.

Enkidu

pickarooney wrote: »

It's nothing to do with arrogance; it's an indisputable fact that some languages have larger word bases than others. Give me 62 synonyms for 'drunk' in Pite Sami off the top of your head.

The "Word Count" method of establishing expressiveness of a language is deficient. Different synonyms are only one method of expressing a concept differently. There are also verb-preposition constructions, e.t.c. So such a method will always favour languages which create synonyms.

Which is why:

English has a much greater number and variety of words than pretty much any other language which I think gives it an advantage in many areas of expression.

is labelled as a myth by linguists. The only area where you may be correct is science, in which case English and other major global languages do have an advantage. However I must emphasis that I mean proper scientific terminology like "Cobordic Manifolds", e.t.c. not everyday science words like "particle".

So outside of high science, English wouldn't really be more or less expressive than any other moderate sized language like Dutch, Greek, e.t.c.

Remember Homeric Greek, famous for its expressiveness, would have had less than one million speakers.

pickarooney

Enkidu wrote: »

The "Word Count" method of establishing expressiveness of a language is deficient. Different synonyms are only one method of expressing a concept differently. There are also verb-preposition constructions, e.t.c. So such a method will always favour languages which create synonyms.

Why quote part of my post which was a direct rebuttal of that exact point and argue that it doesn't prove a different point?

...is labelled as a myth by linguists

Which part is a myth? That English has more words (it has, demonstrably so) or that this lends itself to greater expressiveness (who labels it a myth?)

So outside of high science, English wouldn't really be more or less expressive than any other moderate sized language like Dutch, Greek, e.t.c.

For one thing, it's virtually impossible to swear with any degree of effectiveness in Dutch. In turn, English lacks a whole dimension of swearing available in the Slavic languages. Languages whose verbal infinitives and tense prepositions are all more or less uniform lose out when it comes to rhyming schemes, agglutinative languages don't lend themselves so well to pithy comebacks, languages with fewer synonyms, homonyms and homophones are harder to make puns in and of course "there's no German word for fluffy"*

*I know there kind of is, but it's a valid remark on the impossibility of perfect translation.

Some things just don't translate from one language to another, at least not without sounding very clunky. For example in French a stag night becomes a 'nuit d'enterrement de la vie de jeune garçon' while anti-clockwise is 'dans le sens inverse des aiguilles d'une montre' and conversely there is no common English term for 'mauvaise foi' and only a couple of practicable synonyms for 'eat'.

Enkidu

pickarooney wrote: »

Why quote part of my post which was a direct rebuttal of that exact point and argue that it doesn't prove a different point?

Possibly I read you wrong. Maybe I'm being dense, could you explain what point your post was refuting? Perhaps I ascribed to you the inverse of what you are actually saying, apologies if that is the case.

Which part is a myth? That English has more words (it has, demonstrably so) or that this lends itself to greater expressiveness (who labels it a myth?)

The latter. It's given as an example of a linguistic myth in a few introductory linguistics textbooks. I could give you a few references if you would like.

agglutinative languages don't lend themselves so well to pithy comebacks

I don't agree with that. Spartan Greek was highly agglutinative and yet the speech of that area is the origin of our term "laconic".

pickarooney

Enkidu wrote: »

Possibly I read you wrong. Maybe I'm being dense, could you explain what point your post was refuting? Perhaps I ascribed to you the inverse of what you are actually saying, apologies if that is the case.

The point in the post I quoted - that all languages had essentially as many words and synonyms.

Enkidu wrote:

The latter. It's given as an example of a linguistic myth in a few introductory linguistics textbooks. I could give you a few references if you would like.

Sure, why not, I might learn something

I don't agree with that. Spartan Greek was highly agglutinative and yet the speech of that area is the origin of our term "laconic".

My knowledge of Spartan Greek is nil but unless it was vastly different from other forms of Greek it was not an agglutinative language, but a fusional one, i.e. the morphology occurs within the word as opposed to by adding bits on.

Enkidu

pickarooney wrote: »

The point in the post I quoted - that all languages had essentially as many words and synonyms.

Ah, yes. My mistake, I was assuming this was meant as a point (English is more expressive, because..), rather than a simple factual statement.

Sure, why not, I might learn something

Language Myths, Baurer, L. and Trudgill, P.
It's not technical, but a nice read. If you would prefer something technical please say so.

My knowledge of Spartan Greek is nil but unless it was vastly different from other forms of Greek it was not an agglutinative language, but a fusional one, i.e. the morphology occurs within the word as opposed to by adding bits on.

That is correct. There is some ambiguity as to what agglutinative means. It can include fusional languages or not. You are using the more correct definition, so my point is moot.

Would you have references on agglutinative languages not being good at pithy comebacks, it makes logical sense, but it would be interesting to read something. Of course I understand that it's the kind of thing that is difficult to get references on.

deman

koganei12 wrote: »

I assure you, there is no shortage of synonyms in any language I have ever studied. People who don't speak another language often think there their own one has more words than others do. That's just because there they're not good enough at the other languages to know the synonyms. I've met Spanish and French people who told me they thought the same about their own languages, they thought English was deprived of words, at which point I readily reamed off about a dozen synonyms they didn't know for pretty basic words they thought they'd mastered. Arrogance is international it would seem.

Who's being arrogant? I'm stating a fact that I thought was pretty well known. The English vocabulary has about 2 times more words than that of the French language.

pickarooney

Enkidu wrote: »

Language Myths, Baurer, L. and Trudgill, P.
It's not technical, but a nice read. If you would prefer something technical please say so.

That does look interesting. I want to read the chapter about some languages (not) being harder than others.

Would you have references on agglutinative languages not being good at pithy comebacks, it makes logical sense, but it would be interesting to read something. Of course I understand that it's the kind of thing that is difficult to get references on.

Sadly not, it was just speculation on my part to be honest.

1stimpressions

Thank you for the replies. I was arguing to a English teaching friend of mine from a rational point of view that he couldn't state that English was the best or the most expressive language without a knowledge of many other languages as there is no comparison being made otherwise. I also presumed the volume of numbers alone cannot confer a language more expression considering the different ways in which languages are formed and used. On a related note, what is the highest number of languages one person has gainfully mastered? Wouldn't people who have studied many languages have a good deal to say on the subject?

pickarooney

Someone like Charles Berlitz would probably have been a good person to ask. A guy called Ziad Fazah holds the official Guinness World record at 58.

deman

A guy I know speaks 18 fluently, or at least he claims to be fluent in. His English is excellent however but he says it's about the seventh or eighth down the list. He from Belgium and grew up with French and Flemish (in that order of importance).

tac foley

deman wrote: »

Who's being arrogant? I'm stating a fact that I thought was pretty well known. The English vocabulary has about 2 times more words than that of the French language.

Aha, mon ami! That sentence has you caught in between a cleft palate and a place of rockies!

It is a fact well-known that the language of English has many a word of the French within its portals!

taq

tac foley

Try translating most well-known aphorisms into almost any language and see how far you get.

My favourite quotes - just six words in English, 'Out of sight, out of mind'. And then, the famous three and four-word quotes - 'Love's labours lost' and 'First come, first served', 'least said, soonest mended'.

Try them out in, say, German.

tac

im invisible

invisible idiot..

deman

tac foley wrote: »

deman wrote: »

Who's being arrogant? I'm stating a fact that I thought was pretty well known. The English vocabulary has about 2 times more words than that of the French language.

Aha, mon ami! That sentence has you caught in between a cleft palate and a place of rockies!

It is a fact well-known that the language of English has many a word of the French within its portals!

taq

I'm not disputing that fact. In fact that's exactly the reason why English is so colourful; its borrowing of words from other languages; something that the French don't do.

slowburner

Latin is the language of law and logic, French is the language of romance, German is the language of engineering and English is the language of, em....I can't remember.

English the best language? It must be a hoor to learn.
Which rules apply to the pronunciation of these words?

rough, chough, cough,
plough,
through,
though, dough,
thought.

pickarooney

slowburner wrote: »

Latin is the language of law and logic, French is the language of romance, German is the language of engineering and English is the language of, em....I can't remember.

English the best language? It must be a hoor to learn.
Which rules apply to the pronunciation of these words?

rough, chough, cough,
plough,
through,
though, dough,
thought.

The rule of imitation, the one all children instinctively apply

slowburner

Imitation of broad sounds as a child, fair enough, but the spelling must be a different matter, especially if someone is learning English as a foreign language - don't you think?

wonton

one thing that must be great for people that are learning english though is that for a good few languages you don't have to switch keyboard.

deman

slowburner wrote: »

rough, chough, cough,
plough,
through,
though, dough,
thought.

Hiccough

odds_on

slowburner wrote: »

Latin is the language of law and logic, French is the language of romance, German is the language of engineering and English is the language of, em....I can't remember.

English the best language? It must be a hoor to learn.
Which rules apply to the pronunciation of these words?

rough, chough, cough,
plough,
through,
though, dough,
thought.

Take, for example, the vocal sound found in the simple word too. The double oo is actually pronounced something similar to a long “u” (and it is thus written in phonetics as /u:/). However, there are numerous other vowels and vowel combinations, which also denote this one sound: move, shoe, you, blue, flew, rude, through and, of course, two. To make matters more difficult, the same vowels or vowel combinations in these words are pronounced differently in other words. Some examples are: the “o” in the word move changes pronunciation in the words hot, note and cold; the oe in shoe is different from same combination found in toe, amoeba and does; while the ou in you has a different sound in touch, journal, shout, could.

I am glad that I never had to learn English as a foreign language.

tac foley

deman wrote: »

I'm not disputing that fact. In fact that's exactly the reason why English is so colourful; its borrowing of words from other languages; something that the French don't do.

Le Week-end, Le Hot-Dog, Le Walkman and so on?

There is a very strong movement in the French culture today to totally ban the use of Franglais like this.

Quite right, too.

Then we shall give them back all their words. [BTW, that sentence does not have a single bit of French in it, nor does this one.]

tac

An Carolineach

wrote a funny essay about the absurdity of German, which I suppose argues implicitly for the superiority of English. In any case it probably makes more sense than the essay you're looking for, the thesis of which is silly.

tac foley

Here is a part of the story of the discovery of the elements, written by the Sci-Fi author, Poul anderson - in modern-day Anglisc....

For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.

The underlying kinds of stuff are the *firststuffs*, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.

The firststuffs have their being as motes called *unclefts*. These are mightly small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called *bulkbits*. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in ices when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike clefts link in a bulkbit, they make *bindings*. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff.

OK so far?

tac

odds_on

tac foley wrote: »

Le Week-end, Le Hot-Dog, Le Walkman and so on?

There is a very strong movement in the French culture today to totally ban the use of Franglais like this.

Quite right, too.

Then we shall give them back all their words. [BTW, that sentence does not have a single bit of French in it, nor does this one.]

tac

But the French are trying to remove the English words from their language.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2048323/French-language-website-creates-list-English-words-wants-ban.html

Manach

What makes a language great is the use and diversity of people who speak it. That was culled from the book 'Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin', where the author attributes the global success of latin to how it was the language of empire and Church. English today is the premier language of the web. So long as it retains that ability to be a linga-franca for people to communicate untrammelled by attempts to impose barriers (cough Minister Sherlock) then it will remain great - or else sic transit gloria mundi.

tac foley

odds_on wrote: »

But the French are trying to remove the English words from their language.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2048323/French-language-website-creates-list-English-words-wants-ban.html

I thought that's what I wrote in MY post?

tac

pickarooney

It's not as though anyone gives a damn what the AF think about anything. They're pretty much a laughing stock outside of their own arondissement. The Québecois are far more stringent on the use of anglicisms in French.

P. Breathnach

pickarooney wrote: »

... The Québecois are far more stringent on the use of anglicisms in French.

Which difference is reflected in a phrase used in France to refer (somewhat derisively) to Québecois: les chiens chauds.

odds_on

tac foley wrote: »

I thought that's what I wrote in MY post?

tac

Sorry, tac, you did indeed say that the French are trying to ban English words. I must have somehow miss-read your post.

tac foley

odds_on wrote: »

Sorry, tac, you did indeed say that the French are trying to ban English words. I must have somehow miss-read your post.

De nada, mo chara.:)

tac