To those of you who are actively multi-lingual....

[KittyOfSteele]

Could you be a little more specific as to why?

I literally did that throughout the entire paragraph.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

I suppose it's quite an amusing situation when a Spaniard asks a Mexican to hand him the jacket.

That reminds me...

You know those popsicles without the stick that come in a bag? Everywhere in Venezuela these are known as chupi or chupi chupi (sucky, or sucky sucky). However, if you're in the Lara State, you should NEVER ask for a chupi at a store. They call that bambino instead. A chupi in Lara means a little blowjob.

Don't even get me started on how the words from "straw" (as in the thing you drink from)

 

[BillyWalrus]

I literally did that throughout the entire paragraph.

I went back and read the paragraph and I am either looking at the wrong post or I just don't see it. I see where you said Spanish was better for writing but nothing that followed made any sense as a reason why.

 

[Bramblethorn]

What do you mean here by "register?" I assume you don't mean the musical "high or low."

Consider "dog" vs. "doggy" or "canine". They mean pretty much the same thing (ignoring non-domestic canines) but one wouldn't talk about a "doggy" in a formal business letter or a "canine" when talking to the average small child. That's the kind of thing we mean when talking about different "registers" in a language: the vocabulary and grammar shift depending on the situation where we're communicating,

 

[AG31]

Here are my two cents.
But, excuse me, I'm just an idiot and my opinion isn't worth reading, much less than humble.
1) Therapists say that each of us expresses a different personality depending on our age and the situation in which we learned a certain language. For example, if a child speaks Polish as a child, English at school, and German with their lover, Polish will be the language of candy, toys, nursery rhymes, and numbers from one to one hundred (did you know that Asimov and all the other “emigrants” did mental calculations in their native language?). English will be the hated language of boring homework, the Saxon genitive, the Oxford comma, and verbs with irregular past tenses. And German (strange, huh?) will be the language of adult life, pornography, and desire for the two lovers. Am I wrong?
TLR = English is a composite language, if a new trend emerges, there will be words in English to describe it, long before other languages.
2) Many readers of this site cannot find anything as good in their native language. This is (probably) due to political or religious censorship or the poor vocabulary of their native language. For example, in my language there is no word for “dildo” or even for ‘cunnilingus’ (many husbands do it to their wives but there is no word for it) or for “keyholder” (newsstands sell rings for collecting keys but that's not what it means) or for BDSM or CFNM. As a result, many readers eager for well-written stories are forced to read here... and Literotica is almost 95% composed of English texts.
3) I didn't know English when, almost 25 years ago, I stumbled upon this magnificent site, Literotica. A single unique wonderful tale attracted me like a magnet, and, believe it or not, I translated it word for word using a paper dictionary. Am I stupid? Maybe. Am I the only one? I bet not.
Twenty-five years ago, there were no automatic translation products: Google Translate dates back to 2005, I think. Today, translating an unclear sentence is much easier (especially if your text says “Oh, yes, don't stop, oh, again, I love you, oh John, yes!”). They say that most people approach English through songs (in 1967 in Argentina, Mafalda because of the Beatles!), but I bet that erotic literature has motivated more people than we think!

I think this is at least 50 cents worth.

 

[AG31]

I literally did that throughout the entire paragraph.

See @BillyWalrus's reply #28 to this same question

 

[KittyOfSteele]

I went back and read the paragraph and I am either looking at the wrong post or I just don't see it. I see where you said Spanish was better for writing but nothing that followed made any sense as a reason why.

See @BillyWalrus's reply #28 to this same question

• One of the reasons Spanish is harder than English is due to the amount of conjugations we have for verbs. That gives Spanish more freedom to write than English.
• I didn't mention this, but in English you always need to mention the subject by name or pronoun. In Spanish, writing in both first and third person is smoother because you don't have to keep mentioning the subject; it's already implied in both context and verbs. Since Spanish is a gendered language, it's also easier to determine who is the subject by way of gender.
• Look into Spanish works and you'll see the majority of them are littered with purple prose, from Miguel de Cervantes all the way to the Latin American Boom authors. I explicitely mentioned Rómulo Gallegos because he is considered the best Venezuelan novelist by many, and his way of painting the Venezuelan countryside is so beautiful it brings you there, though he sometimes wastes a lot of words in describing things that don't matter. An example brought by a Venezuelan friend after reading Cantaclaro: he is traumatized by Gallegos wasting so many words describing a roof. While I hate purple prose personally, poetry is something that it's far much easier to read in Spanish than in English. The way lyrics syllables work in Spanish gives the poem a much more natural flow, especially with the softer sounds Spanish has compared to English, which has been described as Germans trying to speak Latin by some meme circles.
• Erotica in Spanish works if it is written in Spanish. Translations vary, depending on the translator. As I mentioned, many works translated to Spanish make it sound childish. I'm telling you, the next time I read someone translating "dick" to "picha" I'm throwing that book on the wall. "Picha" is a very childish way to refer to a penis. It's like calling them wee-wee.
• Spanish, overall, is richer than English, not because it's an older language, but because it is more diverse. The Spanish Empire colonized far more countries than the British Empire, and each former Spanish colony not only has their own accent and dialect, but there's also different accents within them, and sometimes new dialects altogether. Paraguay and the Philippines are interesting cases though. In Paraguay, both Guaraní and Spanish are official languages, but in the Philippines Spanish is simply recognized as a language. Regardless, most translated books come from Spain (and sometimes Argentina), thus they tend to read very homogenized, but there's always an author who writes something in its native language that loses all its magic not by translating it to a different language, but to a different dialect immediately. Books like Lucas García's Payback, or Joaquín Guerrero-Casasola's La Sicaria de Polanco will have completely different stories if translated to another dialect. Most stories in Payback take place in Caracas, but if you dare to translate those stories to English, you're automatically changing its location. The same goes for La Sicaria de Polanco; the whole book takes place in the Polanco colony within Mexico City, but just remove the Mexican dialect from it, and you're orphaning the book from its context. What I'm trying to say is that Spanish, for writing, grounds fiction more into its setting than English. It's the same reason why all Orcs have been established to have Cockney accents, or Dwarves to have Scottish accents.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

Don't get me started on the French from France with their language purity obsessions. Je suis un Québécois and in our French we borrow any word we want and make it our own.

Provided the OLFQ doesn't object. After all, je mange la pate alimentaire de la type Italien avec mon hambougeois.

 

[BillyWalrus]

Provided the OLFQ doesn't object. After all, je mange la pate alimentaire de la type Italien avec mon hambougeois.

Tabarnak! Those fuckers bitching about pizza signs.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

Yes, English is especially rich.

But don’t take my word for it, take this guy’s:

 

[big_cane_sugar]

I don't know much Chinese other than a few characters that I learned basically for un, but it seems like that would be a very rich language as well. They've been writing erotic fiction for hundreds of years (that I know of) and other kinds of texts for thousands of years, and the way the characters are constructed allows for all kind of punny cleverness that could never be translated. Also the dialectical richness is on another level. If you ever go to Taipei, the public transportation system announces the station in several dialects of Chinese, which makes every stop fascinating, especially if you know the characters in one of those dialects.

 

[TheLobster]

But don’t take my word for it, take this guy’s:

Interesting points. Perhaps the specific combination of them all is indeed unique to English, but at the same time each of them definitely isn't.

• Registers exist in basically every language that has to be used in an official capacity (state bureaucracy, religious rites, etc.). To change the vocabulary isn't the only way to register-switch; in his example with Holy Spirit vs. Holy Ghost, the distinction in other languages is often realized grammatically by reversing the usual order of the adjective and the noun.
• Any language's vocabulary slices the semantic space in different ways, emphasizing some concepts and diminishing others. The fact that the exact equivalent of 'obscure' or 'loom over' doesn't exist in Spanish is irrelevant; I'm sure it's compensated for in other ways. English doesn't have 'Schadenfreude' unless you import it wholesale, and neither 'know' nor 'learn' nor 'absorb' conveys the exact meaning of 'kennelernen'; but that doesn't make German superior.
• The point about verbs and prepositions is honestly kind of hilarious. You can get quite creative in the same way in German with its compounds, and Slavics wipe the floor with both when it comes to coining ad-hoc verbs.

 

[TheLobster]

To my ear, Slavic and Romanic languages are far better suited for singing. The vocals have more presence than in Germanic languages, and words sound more melodic in comparison.
Italian, Spanish, and Russian are good examples, but also other languages that belong to the same group of languages.

There's one more thing that makes English a poor choice for signing. Especially when overlain with music, it's very easy to mishear the words; mondegreens are a thing, after all.

And this is not just on the level of words sounding similar, mind you. The sentence structure in English consists of a scaffolding of key verbs and pronouns ("have", "be", "I", etc.) upon which the other words rest. If you mishear one of those load-bearing words, the whole perceived meaning of a sentence changes, sometimes to nonsense; whereas a language with larger requirement for grammatical concordance -- noun form must agree with adjective form, or verb conjugation with the pronoun, if any -- has a built-in mechanism for error correction that often allows you to recover the full meaning.

 

[Writer61]

English is hotchpotch of Germanic and Romance languages stemming from population flows 1000+ years ago, enriched by subsequent movements, and seasoned by Empire. Which is why there is such a rich vocabulary, often giving a range of alternative words. I can see that this may make it better for nuance, but I don't know any other languages well enough to judge.

It is certainly more flexible than French, policed by the Academie Francaise, or the ossification of Chinese, due to the constraints of a character-based writing system.

I recall an article in The Economist exploring the global pre-eminence of English. It quoted experts who argued that part of the success of English as second language is that grammar is less important to comprehension than, say, German. In other words, you can speak badly and still be understood.

 

[big_cane_sugar]

the ossification of Chinese, due to the constraints of a character-based writing system.

I have never heard of this being a problem. Very interesting! I'll look it up to find out what you're referring to!

 

[Writer61]

That reminds me...

You know those popsicles without the stick that come in a bag? Everywhere in Venezuela these are known as chupi or chupi chupi (sucky, or sucky sucky). However, if you're in the Lara State, you should NEVER ask for a chupi at a store. They call that bambino instead. A chupi in Lara means a little blowjob.

Don't even get me started on how the words from "straw" (as in the thing you drink from)

That reminds me of an occasion at University.

We had an exchange of student-teachers from the US whose time included a period in a school. One of them returned from a day with some primary kids (age 6/7 IIRC), traumatised after one of the little darlings asked her for 'a rubber' (UK English for eraser).

 

[Writer61]

I have never heard of this being a problem. Very interesting! I'll look it up to find out what you're referring to!

Basically, you can't make new words in Chinese in the way that you can with an alphabet. You may be able to assemble two characters in a previously non-existant combination, but that's it.

 

[big_cane_sugar]

That reminds me of an occasion at University.

We had some exhange students from the US whose time included a period in the classroom. One of them returned from a day with some primary kids (age 6/7 IIRC), traumatised after one of the little darlings asked her for 'a rubber' (English for eraser).

When I was young we lived in a very small town (population c 500) and there was a store that had a condom vending machine in the bathroom. They also sold ice cream. So one day my younger brother (completely innocently) discovered the condom machine and figured out how to buy a condom and then asked the store owner what it was. Apparently he told him it was a balloon, so my brother went home and asked our mom to blow it up for him.

Our mom was not the kind of woman to put up with that. My brother got an earful and that store owner got about three of them, but have to say my sympathies lie with him at least in terms of the lie. Got to say something, and you don't want to be explaining that to a first-grader. OTOH I'm sure if he could do it over again he wouldn't have let my brother out of the store without exchanging that condom for (say) an actual balloon.

 

[big_cane_sugar]

Basically, you can't make new words in Chinese in the way that you can with an alphabet. You may be able to assemble two characters in a previously non-existant combination, but that's it.

That's basically what they do, but they do it whenever they want. When they want to create completely new words, at least initially they use characters that sound the same. To imitate it in English, if they made up a word like "skibidi" they would just use a character that sounds like "skih" with a character that sounds like "bi" and a character that sounds like "di." Since they have characters for any sound in their language, they can always find something and usually they can choose between several options (i.e. several characters that sound the same) so they can choose something with particular meaning if they want.

But even in alphabetical languages a lot of neologism is more like new compound words like "tradwife" or "broligarchy," and in that case they can just put together characters for "traditional" and "wife" or "brother" and "oligarchy." Not much difference. But if they wanted, they can also just use a character that sounds like "trad" with the character for "wife."

Now that computers are used, the creation of completely new characters can really only be done by someone with official power (it'd be like creating a new letter in the English alphabet) so it basically doesn't happen anymore, but back in the days of paper and ink it could happen anytime someone wanted to do it.

 

[AG31]

Yes, English is especially rich.

But don’t take my word for it, take this guy’s:

Well, thank you so much!

 

[AG31]

English a poor choice for signing.

I assume this was a typo, but it raises an interesting question. Is American sign language more nuanced than other sign languages? How different are sign languages? I have a friend who is a professional translator. I'll see her to chat with in November. I'll ask.

 

[big_cane_sugar]

If we're taking the question about whether English has more "nuance" than other languages truly seriously, then the only answer possible is that of course it does for the kinds of things English speakers over the past 150ish years have wanted to say in nuanced ways, but not necessarily for things that people in other linguistic cultures have wanted to say in nuanced ways.

This is one reason for "code-switching" when people speak multiple languages. Some things that, say, a couple of people who speak both English and Chinese might want to say will be almost impossible to say in English, so they'll use Chinese; other things will be easier to say in English, so they'll use English. When multilingual people speak to each other they switch back and forth for all kinds of reasons but this is one of them.

We also do this between dialects in English. When I want to sound academic, I can do it; when I want to sound like my mom's salt-of-the-earth family members, I can do it. But those two dialects are very different.

Obama, whatever you think of his politics, was a master of this. He could sound like a Harvard guy when he wanted to; he could sound like a black man with experience on the streets of Chicago when he wanted to. That's another form of code-switching, and he did it because sometimes he wanted to say the kinds of things a Harvard guy would say and sometimes he wanted to say the kinds of things a black man from the streets of Chicago would say. Bush II, whatever you think of his politics, also did this very well; sometimes he sounded like the Yankee WASP that he actually was, sometimes he sounded like a Texan good ol' boy. He could switch back and forth to suit his purposes.

Multilingual people do the same thing but to an even greater degree.

 

[StillStunned]

This is one reason for "code-switching" when people speak multiple languages. Some things that, say, a couple of people who speak both English and Chinese might want to say will be almost impossible to say in English, so they'll use Chinese; other things will be easier to say in English, so they'll use English. When multilingual people speak to each other they switch back and forth for all kinds of reasons but this is one of them.

Quite right. My wife and I speak a mixture of three languages. Sometimes the words we choose are from habit, or because we like them more in one language than another, but there are also plenty of words where there's just no equivalent in either of the other languages.

 

[yowser]

English doesn't have 'Schadenfreude' unless you import it wholesale, and neither 'know' nor 'learn' nor 'absorb' conveys the exact meaning of 'kennelernen'; but that doesn't make German superior.

Sorry, this is an embarrassingly picky observation, but there is such an English term for this:

Epicaricacy. Greek root, 'joy from evil.'

 

[MrPixel]

Epicaricacy. Greek root, 'joy from evil.'

So... taking it to the obvious next level... epicaristocracy?