Thread 24491992

Is he right?

>>24491992 (OP)
when is he ever wrong?

He explained it very well in interviews, saying that English borrowed so many words from other languages, and that even similar words have different connotations, that English is just a far more varied mix of sounds and ideas than Spanish is. And he's right.

Not at all, my native language is portuguese and spanish was the first foreign language I've learned because of the proximity between both. I used to read a lot of books in Spanish and I still love it because it is a very beautifil language, but everything changed when I learned English. It is much more straightforward, there are more material available and I realized that when I read a book in English it is more smooth and quick than in Spanish. So yeah, I agree that it is superior

I hate Spanish. There are like thirty different sets of verb endings. It's a pain to keep track of.

English straddles the line between germanic and latin, while spanish straddles the line between latin and moorish, in regards to loan words and so on, and is the weaker for it.

>>24492156
The smartest amerilard golem, gentlemen.
>>24491992 (OP)
Yes.

>>24491992 (OP)
No, and he sort of regretted saying it.

“Habla de una traducción norteamericana de sus cuentos, publicada por
New Directions[1094]: “Por la ley del menor esfuerzo, el traductor siempre
traduce la palabra española por la palabra inglesa más parecida. Si yo digo
habitación, traduce habitation y no room. Resulta un estilo rarísimo y un
idioma que apenas es inglés. Yo dije en alguna ocasión que una ventaja del
inglés es la de ser un idioma mitad anglosajón, mitad latino. Ahora me
castigan por esa frase. Parecería que más que ventaja, es un peligro, una
calamidad.”
(From the Bioy Casares 'Borges' diaries)

GPT translation:

>He talks about a North American translation of his stories, published by New Directions:
>“By the law of least effort, the translator always translates the Spanish word with the most similar English word. If I say habitación, he translates habitation instead of room. The result is a very strange style and a language that is barely English. I once said that one advantage of English is that it is a language half Anglo-Saxon, half Latin. Now I’m being punished for that phrase. It would seem that, rather than an advantage, it’s a danger, a calamity.”
(From the Bioy Casares Borges diaries)

He also said:

"BORGES: «El español tiene mayor pureza de sonidos que otras lenguas.
Está libre de la ü del francés, del exceso de consonantes del inglés. Es un
idioma excelente: yo observo tan sólo que no produjo tantos escritores
buenos como el francés o el inglés."

Translation:

>BORGES: “Spanish has a greater purity of sounds than other languages.
>It is free of the ü of French, of the excess of consonants in English.
>It’s an excellent language; I only observe that it hasn’t produced as many good writers as French or English.”

>>24492170
>brags his language has less sounds
Do brown pipo really?

>>24492164
I feel like thats probably a good way of seeing it, while english got enrichened by latin, spanish is connected to a language that is not very rich in literature and so on, and of which its likely ashamed of (spanish people dont want to be connected to arabs, while the english roleplay as roman constantly)

>>24492176
>>24492164
The difference is that English directly incorporates Classical Latin vocabulary while the "Latin" vocabulary in Spanish is from Vulgar Latin, an inferior version of the language, serf speech.

>>24492180
Spanish has both the vulgar latin and the classical latin, you can say caballo or equino for example. In that way it does have a lot of extra words so that you can modulate speech to sound more or less vulgar, which is an underrated part of spanish

>>24492164
It doesn't "straddle the line". Only about 4% of commonly used Spanish words are from Arabic. It is a Latin language.

Latin: ~70-75% (primary source, including inherited and borrowed terms)
Arabic: ~8% (etymological)
Germanic: ~2% (etymological)
Greek: ~5-7% (mostly through Latin, scientific/medical terms)
French: ~2-3% (medieval and modern borrowings)
Italian: ~1-2% (Renaissance and cultural influence)
Indigenous American languages (e.g., Nahuatl, Quechua): ~1-2% (regional terms, especially in Latin America)
Other (e.g., Celtic, Basque, Hebrew, etc.): ~1% or less combined

For commonly used words:

Approximate percentages of commonly used Spanish words by origin:

Latin: ~80-85%
Arabic: ~4%
Germanic: ~1%
Greek: ~2-3%
French: ~1-2%
Italian: ~0.5-1%
Indigenous American languages: ~0.5-1%
Other: ~0.5% or less

Data is from Grok.
Keep in mind it doesn't account for 100%, due to uncertain etymologies, most of which should to be from Latin, so the real Latin number is more like 90%+. According to Grok:
>The real percentage of commonly used Spanish words derived from Latin, in all probability, is ~88-92%, with ~90-91% being the most likely value.
Seems about right.

>>24492143
No it's inferior. English forces you to chainsaw your thought into little faggots of words.

Smooth & quick = chicken slop nuggets.

>>24492180
Fuck off mutton boy

>>24492164
>>24492176

I can't possibly explain how retarded this is. First, there are very few words in Spanish coming from Arabic, the Latin/Germanic proportion in English is nowhere near the Latin/Arabic proportion in Spanish. There as so few arabic words in Spanish that many of them are also present in English, because only the most important ones have survived (naranja-orange, algebra, cénit-zenith, azúcar-sugar, algodón-cotton, limón-lemon, café-coffee, azafrán-saffron, elixir)

Second, most arabic words in Spanish, aside from some mathematical and astronomical concepts (álgebra, cenit), are daily life nouns to describe tangible objects, so it's not like you are losing any subtlety in adjectives or more abstract nouns by adding what you deem filthy arabic admixture.

Third, those words are adapted to Spanish phonetics so they don't sound bad at all, in fact, many of them sound better than equivalents from other languages. For example, "Aceite" sounds better to me and potentially more poetic than "oil".

>>24492339
there are so few*

>>24492156
Spanish is so simple the 70 iq guatemalan down the street from you can speak it lol

>>24492465
>he thinks guatemalan's speak spanish
oh, you poor poor mind, very few people in "spanish speaking" countries actually speak spanish. You might get a city or two of people in the low IQ's that manage it, but for the most part it's a dud. Coastal people do not speak it, they just hurl sounds around, very much like waving their arms, and call it spanish on virtue of a few common sounds. Most of the ones that actually speak it act as if they understand these beasts.
English is superior.

>>24492170
>>24492229
>Grok
>GPT

>>24492499
Grok, explain, in Hindi, what does this post meaning?

>>24492491
>very few people in "spanish speaking" countries actually speak spanish

>>24492551
What don't you get? Most people in those countries "hurl sounds around, very much like waving their arms, and call it spanish on virtue of a few common sounds"
What part don't you understand?

I speak Spanish and Catalan and I enjoy those languages but I'm reading Suttree right now and it makes you fall in love with English. I don't know how that book could be written in Spanish.

>>24492491
>>24492551
Most Spanish-speakers don't speak grammatically correct Spanish, they speak a simplified version full of slang and loan words.

>>24492830
Most english speakers do that as well dumbass

>>24492830
yes, people speak differently than they write

There's a reason all the greatest novels since the 20th century are written in English (mostly by Americans).

>>24493003
I don't know anon... Hemmingway and Bukowski ain't really a high standart and im not sure you know that...

>>24493021
Hemingway is fine. Bukowski is not who I'm referring to.
Faulkner, McCarthy, Pynchon, Fitzgerald, Morrison, Steinbeck, Vonnegut. I can go on all day, especially if we start talking writers in general in regards to short stories and poetry. Nabokov wrote his masterpiece and better works in English too.

>>24491992 (OP)
Germanic languages in general are great for literature because they are excellent for long sentences that contain a lot of information without being meandering. In fact English because it has so much loan words that tend to break the "germanic" flow of this sentences is actually worse at this then say German or Dutch, as well as not combining two words together as often.
You know how Gabriel Garcia Marquiz said that he prefered the English translation for One hundred years of solitude? Yeah fuck that the Dutch translation is far better.

>>24492830
t. i*tellectual bugman who can’t handle the pure SOVL of the common man’s dialect and thinks all language must conform to his rules, all differences flattened out

>>24492170
kill yourself.

>>24492170
Borges quotes that Angloids don't want you to know.

>>24492573
You're just retarded, no need to elaborate.

>>24492830
>Most Spanish-speakers don't speak grammatically correct Spanish
Yes, they do.
>they speak a simplified version full of slang and loan words.
Sounds like American English.

>>24493003
The reason is America's post-war cultural hegemony. Nothing to do with language. Also, not all the greatest novels since then are in English.

>>24492994
>>24493000
>>24493350
I've never met a Spanish-speaker who knew what subjunctive verbs were.

>>24493609
This? They're used every day.

>>24493616
They're supposed to be, but I've talked to several of the Guatemalans I work with and they insist they've never heard of it.

>>24493672
Did you use examples or just asked them "do you use subjunctive"? Because most people don't really know technical linguistic terms. Guatemalans use voseo like Argentinians and Uruguayans. Maybe it's different there, I don't know. But I've definitely seen Spaniards, Mexicans and Colombians use subjunctive.

the rationale he gave, and which many others give, of english having access to multiple strata and using those for various registers, isn't something that really applies in practice
no one ever cares to differentiate kingly from regal as he did when he gave them as examples, there's no real contrast there, and the fancier you try to go with terms like ameliorate (which ironically is super basic for the languages that inherited it) the more you'll look like an absolute clown
english also has some clear deficiencies that other languages don't have any problems with, like using a single verb for knowledge (to know) rather than two distinct ones, and other issues you can read about here
https://annas-archive.org/scidb/10.1007/978-3-319-05146-8_13/
i myself am very fond of the elegant and fundamental ser/estar distinction that spanish has, and its productive usage of grammatical gender means that instead of having to employ repetitive and unwieldy constructions like "female writer", "male teacher", etc., you just say escritora or maestro with a single word, which is infinitely better
>>24493609
>>24493672
if by "never heard of it" you mean "doesn't know the term", then you fail as well, because "subjunctive verbs" don't exist
it's like speaking of "past verbs" instead of past tense, a clear blunder
if you want an example of something limited to a few dialects that other speakers genuinely do not understand, look at the habitual be of english

>>24493682
>>24493672
>>24493609

Subjunctive is constantly used regardless of the country. Though future subjunctive conjugations are almost only used in legal contexts because pretérito imperfecto (it is shown in the table) can be used with future meaning and has replaced the proper future conjugation.

Regarding literature, subjunctive is one of the richest resources of the Spanish language, its subjunctive is one of the most complex ones in European languages.

>>24493363
Name one not written in English and I'll name you five better that are.

>>24493003
>since the 20th century

Great way to immediately discard like 90% of humanity's literature. What a joke.

>>24493818
Writing has evolved to a point where authors can use more tricks and turns of phrase in this beautiful language than ever before. And lets not pretend that the greatest works of all time aren't around that time anyway. 19th and 20th give or take.

>>24493840
There's no evolution in art. Bugman tier thinking.

>>24493843
Elaborate.

>>24493846
The latest computer is better than a 70s computer. The latest book isn't better than Shakespeare or Cervantes. Art doesn't work like technology.

>>24493860
It doesn't inherently make it better no, but why is it true for humans in every other aspect of life to evolve but not when it comes to creating art? Athletes are better than ever, scientific thinkers are smarter than ever, why not artists? Of course the average writer is not better than the best of the best of that era, but in my opinion the greatest writers of the modern era are.

>>24493840
>And lets not pretend that the greatest works of all time aren't around that time anyway. 19th and 20th give or take.

Shakespeare, Don Quixote, the 4 classic chinese novels, if you want to count them, the Bible and the Qur'an. Arbitrarily setttng a bar and acting like it's an evident truth is retarded.

>>24493885
Faulkner clears.

William Faulknigger

>>24491992 (OP)
ENGLISH IS THE BEST LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD

>english doesnt make sense

IF YOU DONT SPEAK A LANGUAGE NATIVELY, IT WILL NEVER "MAKE SENSE"

THE WORLD SPIRIT CHOSE ENGLISH TO MANIFEST HISTORY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

>>24491992 (OP)
Well, if I remember correctly, he was a bit of an anglophile, so it is no surprise he thought that.

>>24494418
Well put

Spanish has a much clearer sound than English, which tends to sound mumbled.
>>24492176
>a language that is not very rich in literature
>Arabic
anon I...

>>24493892
bait

>>24493142
>>24492499
I can fluently read Spanish and the translations are alright.

>>24492465
English is spoken in several third-world countries, including in South America.
Anyone can speak any language. Speaking it well, however, is a different matter altogether.

>>24494449
>Spanish has a much clearer sound than English, which tends to sound mumbled.
Yeah because Spanish has a consistent system of pronunciation whereas with English you really have to immerse yourself in it to properly pronounce words intelligibly in English. The flip side is that English conjugation is easier and the language is more flexible which allows people to speak extremely broken English and still get the point across. With Spanish that is absolutely not the case.

>>24493770
It certainly seems so. Latin doesn't even have future subjunctives as far as I know.

>>24491992 (OP)
He is. Mutt languages like English are better for literature compared to the "purely" Romance or Germanic tongues

>>24493770
None of that means a layman would be familiar with the word subjunctive.

>>24494718
No, they're not. You only say it because it makes you feel better. Nobody believes that, and even among the English there is a movement to keep the language Germanic. Purity has always been a prized quality for a language. When all or nearly all words derive from a common source, the text becomes more linguistically coherent, a well-built semantic structure where every vocabulary and sound makes sense.

>>24492573
>if i claim something it's true look at me mommy
you're a grown ass man, moron.