Werent you able to learn spanish?
The greatest Spanish language author of the past century, Jorge Luis Borges:
>English is a vastly superior and richer language than Spanish, my mother tongue, in fact I mostly read in English because it is so superior to Spanish.
Spics on the internet:
>NOOOO EENGLEESH IS BABY LANGUAGE FOR EEDEEOTS CABRON! EES SO EASY FOR LITTLE NINOS NO HAVE GRAMMATICAL GENDER AND 3 MILLION VERB CONJUGACIONES THAT ALL FIT THE SAME PATTERN FOR 85IQ LINGUISTIC GENIUSES LIKE US SPICS!! IT HAS NO OF THE LATIN SOUL ESE, I HAVE TO DUMB MYSELF DOWN WHEN I SPEAKA INGLES MENG!
Hmm, I wonder who to believe?
English has a large number of speakers spread out over all continents. It also has a long written history and plenty of intellectual tradition. Ironically, Spanish is one of the very few languages for which similar claims could be made.
As someone who doesn't know any Spanish, it surprises me. Either Borges is wrong or I'm missing something significant in my comparison.
What do you mean native words?
After a certain point, the etymology doesn't matter anymore. Nobody cares if "certain" is of Anglo-Saxon or ultimately Latin origin.
And you make it seem like a bad thing, instead it is a good thing and one of the virtues that Borges lauds it for. English gives you a much wider repertoire to express yourself with compared to other languages.
>Nah, point is that English keeps variants with different etymology to keep nuanced differences.
Right, that's my point.
>Kingly, royal, and regal all mean the same, but their etymological difference gives them distinction in nuance.
Their etymology is unknown to the majority of English speakers, is my point in it not mattering.
Borges is factually incorrect about everything he says in that segment - in reality, every language with literary tradition going back a century or two at least has a "high" register that sounds archaic and elevated, English is not "both Latin and Germanic" (genetic taxonomy takes into account phonological innovations in respect to ancestral idioms, not vocabulary, syntax, or morphology; English is uncontroversially a West Germanic language), the "physicality" of the language he perceives is just the etymological transparency of the examples he gives - verbs like, say, "exclude", are just as concrete in their etymology ("to lock outside"), but their initial semantics is not that readily parsable nowadays.
As for the qualitative evaluation of languages, it's whatever, you can't beat that out of people I guess, even when they're talented writers.
Agreed. I like Borges, but what he says in the video is just plain dumb. He calls phrasal verbs "verbs and prepositions" and then proceeds to say you can't translate:
Loomed over - Cernía sobre
To laugh off - tomar a broma
To dream away - Ensoñar
To live down - Superar la memoria
To live up to- A la altura de
IDK what is up with that. Borges is a legendary translator.
Maybe its just his white supremacist prejudices, the man supported Pinochet after all, the chilean dictator imposed by the USA after killing democratically elected president Salvador Allende in a coup (famous for being the only historical tragedy to ever happen on a September the eleventh worldwide).
What a way to say you hate reading, books and knowledge in general.
https://delong.typepad.com/files/muquaddimah.pdf
https://enriquedussel.com/txt/Textos_Libros/29.Philosophy_of_liberation.pdf
https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/u.osu.edu/dist/5/25851/files/2016/02/taoteching-Stephen-Mitchell-translation-v9deoq.pdf
That makes sense, you read cyrilic. There is a world of philosophy in russian, arabic, african languages and chinese that I don't read because of language barriers. The kid I was talking to speaks spanish but was brainwashed into hating his own culture and idolizing europeans.
Its a sad a common trope of colonies.
>If you disagree with me it means you don't read!!!
Obviously I didn't mention every author, but anyway, compare the English list to the Spanish list and tell me Wich one has the most influential authors? :3
Just answer that question honestly
I think Cervantes is the only heavy hitter there (invention of the novel and such)
Kid, you think nobody knows Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Your ignorance is on display.
https://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/17/world/americas/gabriel-garcia-marquez-dies/index.html
Sure, start with Argentinean wonder Enrique Dussell. This book will allow you to play with the minds of catholics like it was silly putty. All his books are free online, but there is only spanish versions.
https://enriquedussel.com/txt/Textos_Libros/46.Metaforas_teologicas_de_Marx.pdf
I reread my comment and I though i wrote "Gabo" lol
But don't avoid my question dude
Wich list has the higher amount of influential authors?
Let's say I'm an ignorant, okay, and let's say that i want to know this, if you compare both list, Wich list has the most authors who had the greatest influence on world literature?
>English is not "both Latin and Germanic" (genetic taxonomy takes into account phonological innovations in respect to ancestral idioms, not vocabulary, syntax, or morphology; English is uncontroversially a West Germanic language),
Disagreed. English inherits a lot of its derivational morphology from Romance & it is actually just as if not more productive than Germanic morphology.
> Disagreed
That's all just terminology tbh. English is a West Germanic language, but only because that's a conventional decision to put languages into families based on their common speech roots.
> more productive
That's true, but only because many of the things Romance languages do via morphology Germanic langauges achive through lexicology which doesn't really matter.
t. linguistics knower