Thread 24781306

Is it true that french is a much more sophisticated and elegant language than English?

nah

>>24781306 (OP)
That's not much of an achievement.

>>24781306 (OP)
yes

>>24781306 (OP)
All the Romance languages are.

>>24781306 (OP)
It's more sophisticated in the sense that it appeals to people that think of themselves as sophisticates. It is not more sophisticated in terms of the complexity or knowledge or culture it conveys. English displaced it as the Lingua Franca because it is more capable of expressing the technical as was required by the industrial revolution. I disagree that it's generally more elegant. When spoken by beautiful French women it does sound that way. When spoken by everyone else it's just kind of nasty and gay.

>>24781350
>romanian is more sophisticated than English

>>24781358
>English displaced it as the Lingua Franca because it is more capable of expressing the technical as was required by the industrial revolution
No. English became popular because of the influence of America. Has nothing to do with the language itself.

>>24781358
if it wasn't for the US then French or German would be the lingua franca today

>>24781366
Yes.

>>24781306 (OP)
Not at all. The French are pornsick narcissists and they like to speak in a way that's aloof

https://briarfray.org/t/french-psychology-thread/420?u=johnnymcivor

>>24781306 (OP)
Probably more precise, demonstrably less sophisticated than English but in a sense this is a strength. Joyce said something like “its a limited instrument but look at what they can do with it!” English is mixed in its origins which in a sense that makes it inferior as a medium of poetry.
>>24781367
Yes also the internet is American military technology

>>24781306 (OP)
French is throat cancer padded with superfluous characters; only Arabic, Hebrew and perhaps Chinese are more unpleasant to sound out

>>24781306 (OP)
French is a very frustrating language in many ways, but more sophisticated and elegant language than English? Absolutely.
I consider English somewhat inelegant.

Idk what determines whether a language is elegant or not

>>24781501
wait till you find out about german

Where do I start, continue and end with Julien Gracq?

>>24781368
>If it wasn't for another group of Englishmen speaking English than less people would be speaking English

Fantastic insight, anon, do you have a newsletter or Xitter account?

Moby Dick was written in English. Whatever these Baguette eating faggots have written, it certainly doesn’t compare.

>>24781306 (OP)
It's better for being transphobic and sexists. So yes.

>>24781306 (OP)
Yes, but it's also a much less serious and imaginative language. They have no poet of the stature of Milton, no tragedians to speak.

>>24781306 (OP)
Every romance language is more complete and sophisticated than English.

Nah

>>24781350
Borges explained on Firing Line why the opposite is true

>>24781829
Borges said nothing about sophistication and elegance as far as I can remember. He said it was better for other reasons.

>>24781306 (OP)
I would like to speak French as a second language as way to exclude brown people from my conversations.
It’s a language spoken by enough people in this region, though mostly tourists from Quebec, where it would have some practical value, and there is historical context as well since there many French colonials here at one point too.
I think German is a lot cooler but I’d never have anyone to speak with and if I did they’d just want to speak English.
Russian is also cool but I think it would be impossible for me to learn

>>24781306 (OP)
I used some French in the first chapt of my novel and now I can't get an agent.

>>24781854
>as way to exclude brown people from my conversations

>>24781854
>>24781922
Of all the languages kek.

>>24781799
No necessarily

>>24781922
To be fair, he said brown, not black. I'm sure anon loves black people! French is the blackest European language :)

>>24781366
Romanian is probably the most sophisticated of all the Romance languages desu

>>24781306 (OP)
>Is it true that [language] is a much more sophisticated and elegant language than [language]?
No, for any two values of [language] and [language].

>>24781570
Most Americans are not Englishmen, there are more Germans and Irishmen.

>>24782041
It is objectively true that English has an overly large vowel inventory of the sort that is common in Germanic languages and a pants-on-head retarded orthography, and I say that as a native English speaker.

>>24781306 (OP)
If you want to say of all the time sure. If you want to use English loan words to have any kind of semblance of a modern conversation sure. If you want to convey in a paragraph what English does in a sentence sure. Ever wonder why Romance languages are spoken so fast? Because they have to speak that way in order for every conversation to not take 30 minutes.

>>24782060
>five vowels and sometimes y is too much
>can't use simple context clues to determine when to write to, two, or too
That's all it takes to filter /lit/?

>>24782124
>>five vowels and sometimes y is too much
That's the orthography. The spoken English language has about 9 different monophtongs (bat, bot, bought, bet, bit, boot, put, but, beat).
>>can't use simple context clues to determine when to write to, two, or too
I'm talking about shit like this:
https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

>>24782060
a flexible orthography lets it to absorb foreign words easily without forcing them into rigid spelling/pronunciation. probably a good thing for a global lingua franca.

>>24782161
>Some random person's spitballing
>>24782166
Elaborate. How exactly does it do that? Because English still adapts foreign words into its own phonology, every language does that.

>>24782131
>oh geez you mean vowels can be combined to make new sounds? That's too much
>I'm talking about shit like this
The English vocabulary has tens of thousands of words, having to remember a few hundred odd ducks is not a big ask. Fun poem, btw, I haven't seen it before.

>>24782174
>>oh geez you mean vowels can be combined to make new sounds? That's too much
Language is composed of sounds, not letters. Writing is to language as musical notation is to music. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (a more precise sort of notation), the sounds I'm referring to are /ɑ æ ɛ J i ɔ u ʊ ʌ/. That is way more vowel phonemes than basically any other language. (And that's American English, something like Australian English is even worse!)
>The English vocabulary has tens of thousands of words, having to remember a few hundred odd ducks is not a big ask.
Flesch and Rosenfelder both estimated English orthography is only about 85% regular. The entire concept of spelling bees seems utterly insane to most of the world.

>>24782182
The J should be a small caps I, I don't know why 4chan does this.

French is monotonous at length but quippy if used sparingly

>>24782168
english can take ‘croissant’ or ‘pho’ and let people approximate the original sound without breaking the rules. in other systems the word would have to fit the existing phonotactics exactly.
>Some random person's spitballing
you can say that about just about everything.

>>24782187
Loanwords in English do not generally violate English phonotactics, cf. the schwa in "Knesset".
>you can say that about just about everything.
Not really? There's no attribution, and the original author gives no evidence for their claims.

>>24782190
the point is english allows more variation without being ‘wrong’. take spanish; football becomes futbol.
>There's no attribution
one robert graves. and he does offer a point of comparison in the academie.

>>24782202
If you don't respell loanwords all it really accomplishes is that now you have to learn the orthographies of a dozen other languages just to know how to pronounce every word in your own language. What's the advantage of that? If you're writing in English, why shouldn't you follow the English convention for recording the sounds that are in your utterance?

>>24781306 (OP)
Yes. For centuries it was THE language to learn for the elites.

>>24782207
prioritises flexible comprehension.

>>24782219
How, exactly, does it do that?

>>24782222
doesn’t force a single standard.

>>24782228
No, instead it puts far more burden on readers by making them learn multiple standards (not to mention a bunch of exceptions to the main one).

>>24782232
which circles back to what RG said in >>24782161
the english method tends to ambiguity and obscurity of expression; the (say) french, to limitation of thought.

>>24782237
But the French also frequently keep the spelling of loanwords.

>>24781306 (OP)
Its not Anglo, and therefore irrelevant. Nothing else about it matters in any conversation between the two, as Anglos are the eternal World Protagonists and everyone else unironically doesn't matter. Simple as.

>>24782241
with a different (single) pronunciation.

>>24782244
...are you suggesting loanwords into English never change their pronunciation from the original language? Or that other languages never have variant forms of a single loanword?

>>24782211
Also coincidentally the worst centuries for European literature.

>>24782255
just that english is unusually tolerant. you don’t have to match a single ‘correct’ form to understand a word.

>>24782259
Words have multiple variant forms in many languages.

>>24782262
most other languages mark deviations from the standard as ‘wrong’ or informal.

>>24782263
And English doesn't? "Ain't" or "finna" will still get a "non-standard" note in dictionaries.

>>24782265
talking about loanwords not slang.

>>24782270
You think /ˌhɑləˈpinjoʊ/ for jalapeño won't get marked in a dictionary as more correct than /dʒəˈlæpənoʊ/?

>>24782270
>>24782277
Also "ain't" and "finna" are dialect, not slang. Dialect is forms of language used in a certain region or by a certain social class, slang is certain ephemeral expressions used informally.

>>24782277
dictionaries record usage.

>>24782279
splitting hairs about terminology, but still misses my point. there is no simple, correct english, but only innumerable precedents of arguable validity.

>>24782284
That's... true of every language? Language is a social convention.

>>24782291
in french, the academy recognises no more than one way of writing/speaking the language: c’est a dire, correctement.

>>24782296
And the Academy has no power over what the French language actually is, any more than King Canute could order around the tides.

>>24782299
in the last century the severe control by the academy tempted anti-academic writers to acts of sabotage.
it’s a prescriptive standard. english has no such body.

>>24781367
Doesn't English have like the most actual words? I've had like at least 5 different words in English translated to Dutch as "ambiguous".
>>24781854
>I would like to speak French as a second language as way to exclude brown people from my conversations.
This is hilarious roflcopter I actually refused to learn French in school because all the black and brown would exclusively speak it and I didn't want to be associated with them or know what they were saying desu

>>24782308
>Doesn't English have like the most actual words?
Basically impossible to meaningfully measure.

>>24782326
dictionaries give rough estimates.

>>24782333
But then it just depends on their criteria for what words to include, what counts as a separate word, etc.

>>24782347
they generally go by base words. the biggest french dictionary has 120000 words, the OED has 600000.

>>24782057
That's a load of bollocks

>>24782460
I'm just going by the statistics.

>>24782460
you are, statistically speaking, more likely to be related to a jungle nigger than an englishman

>>24781570
>Americans
>another group of Englishmen

The majority of Americans are literally non-white lmao

>>24782308
>Doesn't English have like the most actual words?

That's Greek

>>24782359
Again, still a lot of wiggle room for different criteria and definitions.
>>24783079
If you define "Greek" as including every work from Homer on down even if it's completely incomprehensible to a modern speaker without prior study, maybe. But that's like including everything from the Roman Kingdom on down as Italian.

>>24783934
you’d need huge differences in criteria to turn 120,000 into 600,000.

>>24781306 (OP)
>Is it true that french is a much more sophisticated and elegant language than English?
God no. Have you ever heard French spoken in person? It sounds like they're trying to speak English with a dick in their mouth.

>>24781306 (OP)
When men say this, they're referring to the cold mathematical qualities of a language such as cases and gender. French is 'sophisticated' because it has le chairs and la faggots or something

France seems like it has better writers. I wouldn't know since I only know English and can only read translations.

English has like 800,000 words, French only has 135,000. You can't be as sophisticated with French

>>24781306 (OP)
How do I say this janky shit in french?
>The victim in question was Mr Smith, whom was murdered by his ten year old daughter.
Whom between a preposition and question mark sounds natural, but as shown here if it's used before a verb it ruins the flow of the sentence.

>>24782308
I think English is fairly well known for having many different ways to say the same thing, and of the languages I've been exposed to it has a stronger stylistic expectation among native speakers not to repeat words too close together unless absolutely necessary.

>>24784862
Learn French
Download French for Reading by Karl Sandberg and you can also read Le Français Par La Méthode Nature for supplementary input
Use anki to drill vocabulary
Everyone on /lit/ should study at least one language to the point where they can fluently engage with that language's literature and French is one of if not the best languages to choose

>>24782308
This is exactly why I never did Spanish

>>24781306 (OP)
No it sounds ugly. Any unbiased person will admit that.
Hon Hon Hon is pronounced obnoxiously by the world for a reason

>>24782308
Sounds like a retarded reason not to learn French. You know English so you can already know what they say and you’re already associated with them via language. You stopped yourself from accessing one of the richest literary traditions because LaQueesha can say bon jour. /pol/fags truly are retarded.

>>24785964
>richest literary traditions
Not that anon but what do the French have besides Camus and that one dude who wrote essays

>>24785016
Nah I think it's just too late for me. Just not an option. I only read French writers but only in translation. It's all I'm capable of. I don't really like English much

>>24785999
>Baudelaire
>Rimbaud
>Verlaine
>Mallarmé
>Paul Valéry
>Apollinaire
>Gérard de Nerval
>Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
>Huysmans
>D'Aurevilly
>Gautier
>Alphonse Daudet
>Alfred de Musset
>Alfred de Vigny
>André Gide
>André Malraux
>Jean Genet
>Céline
>Simenon
>Proust
>Flaubert
>Hugo
>Zola
>Balzac
>Stendhal
L'Étranger is great, it's one of the funniest novels I've read

>>24785016
This. Baudelaire and Rimbaud. You don't need any other reason to learn French, really, and yet you'll still have lots of great writers to enjoy. Vive la France.

>>24786905
I actually started studying French because an anon made a thread here about how you can't translate Baudelaire into English and he provided Correspondances as an example
Looking back he just seemed like an enthusiast with nothing better to do but without him I wouldn't be reading Baudelaire in the original today

>>24786724
all but 3 of them irrelevant outside of france, and 2 of the 3 are hacks

>>24787287
Who's the only good one?

>>24781306 (OP)
French and English are very similar. They share a lot of the same words, just with different pronunciation. But wheras English has muttified itself over the past 400 years, French has remained almost the same, at least grammatically.

>>24787287
No author is relevant anymore. What a dumb post.

>>24787342
>French isn't a mutt language
Nice bait

>>24784432
For example:
Are regional dialect terms included?
Slang terms?
Technical terms only known to experts?
Terms found in old literature but which are no longer used?
Terms made up for one 17th-century poem and only used since in reference to it?
Are "run", "runs", "ran", and "running" separate words?
"Condemn" and "condemnation"?
"Dog" the noun and "dog" the verb?
Idioms?
Proverbs?
Surely that's enough degrees of freedom to make for a factor of 5.
>>24784888
"Whom" is wrong in English here.

>>24788168
you lost

>>24784432
All depends on what counts as a word and how lax are the dictionaries when they accept new entries. Is 'pain au chocolat' one word or three words? Why was 'bootylicious' added to the oxford dictionary? how many other dumb meme words are there?

Until we define sophisticated or elegant and agree upon said definitions, it is a difficult question to answer. And it would take someone completely fluent in both to answer this question well.

I can read Le Petit Prince and trip over some basic greetings in French, so all I've found is that the language typically needs more words to express the same thought in English. For a particularly egregious example of this sort of French : Elle frappe ses mains l'une dans l'autre.

In English : She clapped.

>>24788168
>>24788226
every language has slang, archaic words, technical terms, etc. the OED’s inclusion policy isn’t uniquely loose. english is a two-strand language of anglo-saxon and norman-french, so it carries two parallel vocabularies for almost everything (and also permits unlimited rhythmic variations on scores of metrical norms).

>>24788226
‘pan au chocolat’ is not a base word.

>>24781306 (OP)
The French language is like their better food. Its sweet and charming and its pleasant on the ears. Its sophisticated in that way. Every language has its own idiom. For intance, LeRoi. Literally means TheKing. Yet its understood to be "a thing or object, prominent in its class. The best.". You combine idiom with the pleasing tones of French and it appears sophisticated. Also the French have lots of gestures and they can be very dramatic. So it sounds and "looks" great. German, sounds harsh and pissed off. Frenh? You can cuss them out and it still sounds beautiful. German compliments sound like insults. Its surface appearance and sound, and a real intellectual should be able to see through the veneer. To appreciate a thing only for its sound or appearance is feminine and childish.

>>24781368
>if it wasn't for the US then French or German would be the lingua franca today
I'm pushing 60. When I was very young, French was still the universal language as in you could speak one language and be understood lots of places around the globe traveling for business or pleasure. It was even then being replaced with English. The more dominant country becomes the universal language. Had Germany won world war two, then it might have became german. Instead? English.

>>24781563
nta but at least the krauts pronounce their letters instead of just leaving consonants silent at the ends of words.

>>24788168
>Are "run", "runs", "ran", and "running" separate words?
Look up base words.

>>24787289
Baudelaire

>>24789675
>dude... SEX
lol no

>>24789797
tbqh anon I've never read a single book written by a frenchman
I barely even read fiction, let alone gallic nonsense

>>24785929
>is pronounced obnoxiously by the world
What the fuck are you talking about retard

>>24789198
But is it a lexeme? If you know what the words "pain", "au" and "chocolat" mean on their own do you know what "pain au chocolat" means? To my understanding, if you take a normal slice of whole wheat bread and put a Hershey bar on it, that is not pain au chocolat, just like any toast from France is not French toast in English. That is, "pain au chocolat" and "French toast" are bits of language you need to have separate mental dictionary entries for.

>>24787287
>all but 3 of them irrelevant outside of france
Because the Anglosphere produces and consumes absolute slop. Even most historically famous English and American authors are 'irrelevant' within their own countries now.

>>24781358
English as a lingua franca now is different from how French was a lingua franca historically. In the past, 'lingua franca' referred to the language of intellectual output, it was something elite and that was enhanced by its capacity for complexity. Creoles that emerged to facilitate trade also existed but these were highly simplistic because they only had one very basic task.

English is more like a creole for commerce. It exists to allow for the basic communication of ideas, largely related to trade or technical specifications. This is why ESLs don't learn English properly - they don't care. They don't need to conjugate things or form plurals for the most part. They aren't writing philosophical treatises, they just need enough English to read a manual on how to install a router.

Caring about sounding sophisticated is a clear sign that you lack any authenticity. There is a reason crude and confident people are respected more than some pencil-necked performer

Learning French is the second best decision I've ever made in my entire life
I am incredibly grateful for the literary universe that has opened up to me because of that decision
Idk why French literature is so underrated in the Anglosphere today

>English as a lingua franca now is different from how French was a lingua franca historically
>English is more like a creole for commerce
>ESLs don't learn English properly

>>24791058
agreed

>>24781306 (OP)
it is, English in the medieval times was pronounced the same way as French, it wouldn't be what it is right now without it

>>24781306 (OP)
It's true, however not by much, definitely not enough to warrant learning French.

it's an IQ check. either you kneel before the frogs or you simp for the dog language with which you were born.

>>24781306 (OP)
To say "seventy seven" in French is "Sixty Ten Seven" (soixante-dix-sept) so I wouldn't call French elegant in the sense of meaning precise. Comparing the highest levels of the two languages, French spoken with a Parisian accent probably holds a higher place of cultural esteem than the King's English, at least in the current social climate. As a Canadian, we have an entirely different attitude towards French and the Quebecois are generally perceived as less sophisticated than English Canada as a whole.

>>24791346
>English in the medieval times was pronounced the same way as French

>>24794498
its true look it up