Is English an inferior language?

Antimooner K. T.   Fri Nov 06, 2009 7:18 pm GMT
That's right. Can anyone answer that question? I think of English as utilitarian. I want a language that has enough vocabulary to express meaning without huge circumlocutions.

If that isn't the right use of circumlocutions, then you know more than William Buckley or is it George Will? Maybe it's Buckminister Fuller I mean. William Blake? Will Ferrell? Not Colin Ferrell, not Colin Firth, for sure.

Yes, I'm joking, Laura.
inferiorian   Fri Nov 06, 2009 11:19 pm GMT
<<That's right. Can anyone answer that question?>>

We need to compare English to some other langauge to see it it's inferior.

Perhaps we should start with Spanish. It's been said right here at Antimoon that any language without a subjunctive is not sopisticated. For all practical purposes, English has no inflected subjunctive, hence it's unsophisticated compared to Spanish. Other advantages of Spanish:

- many verb tenses, with complex conjugations (including the all-important subjunctive already mentioned)
- grammatical gender
- reflexive? forms for many verbs
- accent marks (looks more impressive on paper)

Disadvantages:

- trivial (toylike) spelling
- not enough different vowels (too monotonous)
- no comparative and superlative forms for most adjectives

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Looks like the score is 5-3 in favor of Spanish. English is inferior. Question answered.

OK - who wants to compare English to Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, Basque, Lithuanian, Navajo, Sanskrit, Turkish, Russian, Latin, Classical Greek, Classical Ainu, etc. I'm guessing taht English is inferior to almost all of these languages.
evelyn   Sat Nov 07, 2009 3:32 am GMT
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In my opinion, every language is man's wisdom. English enjoys the equal position in the worldjust as other lauguages .
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Orinoco   Sat Nov 07, 2009 4:43 am GMT
There's no room for "all languages are equal" PC sentiment in this discussion. All languages are not equal. Some are just downright shit.
Edward Teach   Sat Nov 07, 2009 5:13 am GMT
I realize that the bitterness that is directed at English comes from envy at native speakers but can you try not to let bother you so much?

People want/have to learn English. They dont want/have to learn your peasant-babble.

We can't help being better than you are. It's just the natural order.
Elijah Rothschild   Sat Nov 07, 2009 6:07 pm GMT
1. No language is superior in the verbal sense. Languages exist to convey meaning. Whether they sound like shit or not does not change the fact that the point came across to the intended listener.

2. Also on that note, beauty is in the eye, or the ear rather, of the beholder.

3. The objective of a so-called "perfect" language would be to convey the most detailed interpretation of the subject using the least amount of effort.

4. Obviously, that knocks most Asiatic languages out of the contest. Four thousand plus Chinese ideograms? Japanese uses romaji, katakana, hiragana, and kanji? Well, technically Japanese is Altaic, so it's barely in the realm of Asiatic languages, mostly just due to fact that kanji is derived mainly from Chinese and Korean.

5. Half the Native American languages historically have not had formalized systems of writing, if any, until recently [(through attempts to educate Native Americans in literacy, linguists, educators, and tribal authorities have worked to engineer anglicized interpretations of native dialects using the Roman (Phoenician) alphabet]. So, most of those languages are screwed right out as well. That's two continents down.

6. Africa is just garbage all around: economically, politically, linguistically, technologically (interesting but primitive, and the nations that speak European languages have dwindled them down into pidgin bullshit).

7. European languages seem by far the most sophisticated, particularly romance languages. The closer to Latin the language is, the higher the efficacy appears to be, both orally and written. Romanian is actually the surviving language that is closest to historical Latin. Too bad their country is a shit hole, but nice language. I speak fluent Spanish, Portuguese, and conversational Yiddish. I had no problem communicating for over half an hour with a group of Romanian tourists in the Dominican Republic last year. People that spoke French, Italian, Catalan, etc. had the same experience. The above languages are derived from vulgar Latin, basically the equivalent of what rednecks in this fine country call English. Sure they were improved upon by local dialects and cross contamination with Germanic and Slavic tongues, but shit tends to stick together, and thus we have languages like my parents native language, Yiddish (Hebrew and upper German mixed together with some obvious Slavic undertones), that sound like shit, are hard to write, naturally do not even have written vowels in them, and have fallen so out of use (Holocaust, not passing it down to children, Ashkenazim Jews wanting to learn Israeli Hebrew even though it has little bearing on the actual heritage of diaspora Jews) that it would be better if I could just forget that shit. Have a bagel man, on me. Shit.