المشاركات: 167
لغة: English
qwertz (عرض الملف الشخصي) 11 مايو، 2011 11:50:03 ص
targanook (عرض الملف الشخصي) 11 مايو، 2011 12:10:05 م
Kraughne:English has stolen most of these sophisticated words from other languages (French, Spanish, Latin). The literature you mentioned could be written in any other modern language - even in Esperanto, which has almost infinite number of possible words (also stolen from other languages, but this time on purpose). Why should English be superior over any other languages?
But English has one of the most sophisticated vocabularies of any of the world's languages. What about all of the abstruse material written in English about subjects like philosophy, mathematics, social issues, linguistics, etc.? I know for sure that we Anglophones aren't just talking about coffee and weather.
ceigered (عرض الملف الشخصي) 11 مايو، 2011 12:46:53 م
Kraughne:I know for sure that we Anglophones aren't just talking about coffee and weather."Oh my, look at the weather. Judging from the range of those cumulonimbus clouds and the local humidity, in conjunction with the recent weather history in the region involving colliding warm and cold air movements, I predict we might have a thunder storm this morning. And damn this coffee tastes like poop. Needs more sugar."
Targanook:English has stolen most of these sophisticated words from other languages (French, Spanish, Latin). The literature you mentioned could be written in any other modern language - even in Esperanto, which has almost infinite number of possible words (also stolen from other languages, but this time on purpose). Why should English be superior over any other languages?It's not superior other than just being spoken by more people.
But if you do want to call it superior, then you've answered your question right there - because we've "stolen" words from other sources in an attempt to cover every single concept we could think of (but honestly, that's impossible, but without sounding any more arrogant, I think English has done a good job, although I would have preferred it stayed separated as Anglo-Saxon English and Anglo-Norman French - we lost a lot of cultural ties in the process to adopt more "civilised" ones, which are still good, but I have to admit old English culture interests me).
But stolen is such a biased word, normally either used in jest, or to illicit a feeling that the "stealer" has done something wrong. And you think we didn't take some words on purpose? There's a reason why every word in a language is used the way it is.
qwertz: But I tried to step back and by now I like English language again. But I also said Good-Bye to the aim ever reaching native language level at English.Unlike you, I'm way too pessimistic and too afraid to study some German casually
. It's an alluring language, but grammatically seems more irregular than English, and so I need to concentrate hard - and then I forget the languages I'm learning at university 
. If I wasn't doing Indonesian I'd probably choose German, but alas, that's another world. 
erinja (عرض الملف الشخصي) 11 مايو، 2011 1:00:30 م
Yep, we totally stole a ton of words when we were invaded against our will.
I guess in the same way, the French "stole" their language from the Romans, right? Modern French territory spoke Celtic languages until the Romans invaded and imported their language, so I guess the French "stole" their words too. I guess the only authentic French who didn't steal were the few remaining speakers of Breton and other small languages, right?
Looks like most of Western Europe are language thieves! Only the *Italians* should be speaking a Romance language; everyone else stole it! What shall we do?
ceigered (عرض الملف الشخصي) 11 مايو، 2011 1:22:36 م
erinja:What shall we do?Chiaramente, we should ditch this stolen langauge (both of them) and only speak Italiano.
From now on, this website shall be named "impara!", half of the green decorations you see on this site shall be made red, and all EO flags will be replaced with pizzas, with the odd SPQR to stay a bit traditionalist.
razlem (عرض الملف الشخصي) 11 مايو، 2011 1:25:43 م
ceigered:NOT GOOD ENOUGH!erinja:What shall we do?Chiaramente, we should ditch this stolen langauge (both of them) and only speak Italiano.
We must only speak Proto-Indo-European.
ceigered (عرض الملف الشخصي) 11 مايو، 2011 1:36:29 م
razlem:Hmph. You're still a hundred years too young. Proto Human is clearly the true language we should all speak.ceigered:NOT GOOD ENOUGH!erinja:What shall we do?Chiaramente, we should ditch this stolen langauge (both of them) and only speak Italiano.
We must only speak Proto-Indo-European.
čuna pal tik! (one finger might be enough considering fingers are the worst smelling part of the body minus the bum)
Major problem though is that I seriously doubt things like vaginas would have had names in the "original language". Only important stuff like bears, snakes, snot and other life endangering things would have really warranted words at first. I think a problem with the way they look at this is that they expect there to be a "full" language with well over 500 words, when in reality something akin to toki pona sounds more realistic, with languages splitting off and evolving as the culture and social intelligence climbed and developed into something require a better langauge to describe it. Humans are apes after all, to start off with our communication would have been identical.
*sidetracking rant over*
targanook (عرض الملف الشخصي) 11 مايو، 2011 1:56:21 م
"English is the best language on Earth"
I must write something to cool down the author. English is usefull, that's true, but is it the best and the most sophisticated? I doubt. First of all it is very hard to master. It is not the same all over the world - there are many different dialects. It has very complicated spelling and pronunciation. So most of those who are learning it do not achive the point of fluency and making a conversation with them is rather boring - as for you is reading what I am writing here...
And English must be used regulary to stay fluent. It takes precious time.
erinja (عرض الملف الشخصي) 11 مايو، 2011 2:23:53 م
Remember that we are all here because we are interested in Esperanto. I'm sure that some Polish people make statements that I disagree with, but I would never come to this forum complaining about those statements. If I did that, it would imply that the Polish people here agreed with those statements. That would be a false assumption.
ceigered (عرض الملف الشخصي) 11 مايو، 2011 2:28:27 م
targanook:"English is the best language on Earth"Who the hell said that because they need a slap in the face
But anyway targanook I must be blunt, what you say about English is the same for any language I've found. It's why, despite spending all of my life since mid-high school dedicated to language learning (granted this is only about 5 years, which may be pathetic to many here), I've never achieved much. Any language is ridiculously difficult to master, except those nifty constructed languages like EO, Interlingua, even Volapük (although there's not many people to master it with
).Anyway, what languages do you find easy? I find the romance languages easy both because of my English speaker background, but also because I like "big words" (what most children call Latin based words), but also because I had a good experience as a very young child learning Italian which made me biased to this day
(il mio italiano è ancora brutto - my italian is still bad). I also find Japanese (but not writing Kanji) very easy since I love Japanese pop culture.Perhaps for you it is very different, thus we find different aspects about languages hard, since my interest in western european languages and eastern asian languages puts me in front of many languages with similarities to English. I know other English speakers who hate any languages with similar features since most of English's features are only useful, as you say, when you have spent much time attuning yourself to them.
Clearly though we all find Esperanto easy, and I think that's the good thing about schematicism. But I feel that's only one side of a complex story.