Hi Vellidragon, I was just quoting something I read in the news, probably twenty years ago. As you say, there will always be situations where one language is more wordy than the other. However, I think your example is a little artificial. From the day before yesterday until the day after tomorrow (17 syllables) von vorgestern bis übermorgen (9 syllables) From the fifteenth to the nineteenth (8 syllables) I can remember a churchman defending the calculation of the date of Easter by putting up a similar straw man of Easter Sunday is the third Sunday in the fourth month after the shortest day in the preceding year as being more complicated than Easter Sunday is the Sunday following the Paschal Full Moon date for the year, rather than speaking natural English and saying Easter Sunday is the third Sunday in April. And, of course, that's assuming that everybody knows when a Paschal Full Moon is! Certainly, the Eastern Orthodox church has a different view from the Western church as to the date of Easter (the two churches last coincided in 1990). But don't just take my word for it...http://blog.lingo24.com/long-winded-languages-the-problem-of-text-expansion-in-translation/ quotes German as being 28% wordier than English, although Arabic, Chinese and Japanese are more compact. There's quite a strong culture in the UK that, because we've got a belief that all you have to do to be understood is speak English slowly and loudly, ALL other countries are polyglot. It came as quite a shock to my wife when we first went to France and she found out the French were speaking French...and on the campsite where we stayed the first night, the only person who spoke any English at all was the landlord's daughter, and that very much schoolgirl English.
My first language is Swedish but I still tend to write in English. Mostly because I usually write Fantasy or Sci-fi and well, Swedish sounds like a pile of horse shit in these contexts. But I do write in Swedish whenever I write Drama, Sob-stories etc.
I write in my native language, Serbian, but I wish I were confident enough to write in English, because of the wider market and due to the fact that I really like the language. On the other hand, Serbian grammar is really difficult, but our reading/writing system is perfect - there are 30 letters and you literally read everything just as it's written. No spelling. Here's my small contribution - couple of verses from one of my favourite Serbian poets: To je onaj život gde sam pao i ja s nevinih daljina, sa očima zvezda, i sa suzom mojom što nesvesno sija i žali k’o tica oborena gnezda. To je onaj život, gde sam pao i ja... (The Dungeon, Vladislav Petković Dis)
Have no fear! If you really like the language, use it! I'm not one to talk a lot on this subject, but what takes away your confidence in writing? Whatever it is, don't let it intimidate you. BTW, do you know a poem called Essential Serbo-Croat by Ken Smith? I did it in my class, and my classmate read the part written in Serbian in a very awkward way. (Not like I could do a better job though) Anyway, I really liked the poem once I understood it better.
Well, I guess I don't really have a lot of opportunities to use English (except on this forum), so I'm not confident that the writing would sound natural to an English-speaking reader. I would have to live in an English-speaking country for a while in order to gain the skills necessary to sound "just right". No, I'm afraid I'm not familiar with it. Could you post that part? Serbian could sound strange, I guess. We have a lot of "č", "ć", "ž" letters which sound a bit rough. For example, reading a word "krčkanje" would definitely sound amusing.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Sure you would benefit more by living in an English-speaking country, but don't let that become an obstacle to your writing. I've only lived in an English-speaking country for one year. South Africa. And even there they have hundreds of languages, so it's not the perfect example. Ok, my English is not as great as that of a native speaker. But, that won't stop me from writing! And that shouldn't stop you either. https://prezi.com/3pueg_q-ztvn/essential-serbo-croat-by-ken-smith/ Sorry that's the best link for the poem I could find.
Interesting... Especially the game at the end The left column seems like a rough and a bit artificial translation of the right part. For example, you'd never say "boli me grudi", but "bole me grudi". Also, I've never heard of construction "slabo mi je", and the "većinom vremena" sound really odd.
I only write in English, because that's the only language in good enough to write in with any fluency. My written German has been known to convince people that I am actually a German, but I wouldn't ever try to write something major. My Icelandic is good enough to show off with, little else. Wenn ich könnte, werde ich. Ef éf geti, muni ég.
I read my first fantasy novels in Finnish, but pretty soon started reading in English. However, I still think the Finnish translation of the Lord of the Rings is better than the original, so that's the only fantasy book that really works in Finnish. I'm not entirely sure why. I think the Middle Earth place and character names just sound awesome in Finnish. For one, the translator did an amazing job, but there could also be something about the culture and the world that feels similar to, e.g. Kalevala, our national epic. I read half of the Harry Potters in English, half in Finnish, and the Finnish translation is actually pretty good too. I prefer the original, but the translation is not atrocious. I read one HP book in Swedish (the 2nd one), and unfortunately that didn't work for me... Then I skimmed the Finnish translation of The Gunslinger (the first book of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series), and it was just horrible. For the most part, the translations are awkward and I couldn't see myself writing fantasy, let alone sci-fi, in Finnish. But let's say there's one and a half exceptions.
I find some of the posts really interesting here, certainly, being an Englishman, I've always had it in my head that English is this horrid, complex language that is difficult to learn and explain, due to its hybrid nature, as a tiny island invaded by lots and lots of nations. But people here seem to be saying the opposite. I've always liked the way French sounds, and there is a bit in the film Donnie Darko, where they discuss the most beautiful word in the English language, being 'cellar door' which sounds very French to me.
No, you are right. English is a fucking terrible language with no rhyme or reason. I hate English with a passion and I resent how ubiquitous it is becoming in the global community. And this is coming from someone who speaks English as a first language. Nevermind, that came out wrong.
I wouldn't say that exactly. English makes a lot of sense to me, but I guess it has something to do with Serbian having a similar logics. It's hard to explain, but, for example, while I was learning French in college, I loved the way it sounded, it was like singing, but when it came to learning grammar, wow, it was sooo hard, and it made no sense to me whatsoever. On the other hand, when I was learning Japanese, even with their difficult writing system, I found its grammar easier to comprehend than the French one. It simply had this logic which was, to me at least, more similar to my native language. Also, back in high school I was learning German, and kinda hated it. Wasn't interesting at all to me, with no passion, it seemed harsh and rough. The language I'd like to learn now is Turkish. It sounds really interesting, and it shares a lot of words with Serbian, due to the historical circumstances. So, I guess you can't have it all in one language. To me, French has a rhyme, but not reason. English makes more sense to me and I like the way it sounds.
English ABSOLUTELY has both rhyme and reason, it's just not obvious when simply looking at the surface.
English has had the exact opposite effect on me. Because it is becoming ubiquitous in the global community, it gave me a sense of wonder and motivated me to appreciate it more than my own language. Whether that's a good or a bad thing, I don't really know. What I DO know is that it has more rhyme and reason to me than any other language.
Meh, not really. I was being hyperbolic. By "no rhyme or reason", I was referring to things like the polysemy, the amount of homophones, the inconsistencies in spelling, grammar, and pronunciation, etc. The things you see in a Google search for "english is hard". Granted, English is not unique in any of these problems. I have just generally been under the impression that it is worse than most.
Actually English is one of the easier languages to learn. It's gender neutral, analytic (for the most part), and inflectionless. The biggest draw backs are superlatives (which are very hard for languages that don't have them) and it's highly idiomatic nature. "Cellar" is in fact french. "Door" is actually "port" in Indo-European (or as close as can be recorded), after Grimm's Law got done with it. It's about as English as it's possible to become, given that it's older than the language itself.
English grammar is pretty regular, actually. Yeah, we have irregular verbs and the like, but every language does and I would argue with anyone who wants to say it's worse than most. Obviously, the spelling can cause some problems, but it's good enough that most people can find the word they're looking for in a dictionary, and it's a million times easier than systems which don't bother representing pronunciation at all (like Chinese). All languages are equally hard, in my mind. It's down to the learner and his mother tongue more than any quality of the target language.
Hi, I wanted to write in my first language - baby talk - but unfortunately I just can't seem to find the proper keys on the keyboard. For example where's the key for "giggling happily with drool coming out of the mouth"? I mean that's an important sound in baby talk - but somehow it got left off every keyboard I can find. Thank's Microsoft!!! Cheers, Greg.
I think the main problem with English is also its glory. Because we've interacted with a large part of the world, we've also had a lot of imported words. This means that the spellings have many different logics, and sometimes different grammatical constructs. And, compared with most other languages, so damned many!
I write in my own language. And no, it's not english. I realize I would probably reach a bigger audience with english especially considering the genres I write in, but I thought I'd rather write in a language that I write well. I don't feel nearly confident enough with my english to write an entire novel.
Yes. I write in English although more US English than UK English. I also include Italian as I have a couple of Italian characters but I'm lucky enough to have an Italian friend who helps me out with that side of things for authenticity.
I started reading in English in 6th grade (i.e. at the age of 12 or so), but still didn't really get into it until a year or two later. Before that I read both fantasy and sci-fi (though lighter fiction than the kind that I read nowadays) in Swedish. I think a major reason why the two genres sound so ridiculous in Swedish is because of English influences; today's Swedish youth (including myself) uses way too many English words instead of the Swedish equivalents, probably due to computer games and the Internet. So I guess I'm simply unused to hear these kinds of stuff in Swedish and thus English sounds more natural. Or maybe I've simply read to much in English...
