Go, English, Math

skydyr · **#61**

palapiku wrote:

skydyr wrote:

My impression is that English is currently somewhat poorly suited to poetry, as a great deal of poetry is about working within restriction and modern English poetry seems to be very much about throwing away "artificial" restrictions.

I think that just means modern poetry is poorly suited for poetry.

I don't have as much experience with modern poetry in other languages, so I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but yes.

skydyr · **#62**

MJK wrote:

1. The pronunciation; why is thare allmoest no rellation between the spelling and the pronnunciation ov werds? Whut an iddiot descided that the spelling must be remaned the same az it ov a thouzand eres aggo. No singgl wun wuud(would) reed 'premise' az 'premmis' when thay happen too see this werd for the ferst time. Whut ar the alphabets ment to be when thay wer ferst made by greeks and romans? Wuud thay be happi too no that in the far advanced fucher 'night' and 'knight' haz the same sound and 'though', 'toe', and 'row' rimes? Hou proud thay wuud be ov thare wunderfuul invention.

2. Well, not in English but in Korean, 60 percent of the lexis has a Chinese origin. This provides a lot of convenience in understanding and learning Korean vocabulary because every words originated from China consists of one or several syllables that comes from a fixed set of approximately 1800 syllables each of which has its own and usually one dominant meaning. I said 'syllable', but they are actually 'letters'. Still, it does not matter because they work fine as 'syllables' each having a particular meaning and monosyllabic pronunciation with some logical rules for word construction, and every native Korean speakers do naturally learn these 'rules' and can guess the meaning of a word seen for the first time to an acceptably accurate extent by also 'naturally' having the information of the set of syllables to an acceptable extent and joining the syllables' meaning in the new word according to a rule to produce a certain meaning of the whole word. Each word rarely has more than two meanings and usually just one, so people do not get confused on which meaning this word has in this context. I don't think I have to explain about this with respect to the English language, whose dictionary consists of twenty volumes.

For teaching younger children how to read English, there are a couple schools of thought. One is that they should learn to sound out the words to make sense of them, but the other is that words should be taught as units without too much emphasis on getting from the letters to the sound. It may be better to think of them as hanja/kanji/hanzi with a lot of phonetic suggestions, but nothing definitive. There is a symbol that represents, say, 'thought', and it's made up of a set of regular and common elements, but these only have a distant relation to the pronunciation. Just as one presumably needs to look up hanja to see what they sound like if it is unknown, the same is true of many written words in English, though you may have a reasonable guess.

Regarding the roots, a lot of more complicated or literary words in English are similar borrowings, generally from greek and latin, but also from french and then a variety of other languages. These can sometimes be given away by spelling or particulars forms (ph, and y in the middle of a word are often givaways). Depending on your familiarity with those languages, however, this may not be as helpful as it is for speakers of other european languages that share a similar set of borrowings from those languages. These borrowings are pervasive enough that there are prefixes and suffixes derived from them that are fairly productive (may be used with new words) like a- and in- (greek and latin respectively) where the native equivalent is un-. Other examples include ex- and re-.

English dictionaries tend to have many more words than other languages, but the vast majority of those words are not needed for normal discussion even on technical topics, and are often the result of frequent borrowings or local terms that are not as widespread.

Bantari · **#63**

palapiku wrote:

Bantari wrote:

English is pretty good... but the best and best sounding sounding poetry I ever heard was in russian. Its a very beautiful language I think, even better for poetry than english. Just my opinion of course.

Russian does have some fantastic poetry. But English is just more versatile. Russian suffers from a much more regular morphology with ubiquitous suffixes - as a result, the rhymes are less varied and overall the language is less terse than English can be. There's just fewer things you can do in a given number of syllables.

This is certainly true, what you say.
However - we have to distinguish here what we mean. Is poetry 'easier' to write in english than in russian? Heck, yeah! Writing things that rhyme in english is snap. In russian not so very much. Same with rhythm and other stuff that goes into making a poem or a song.

But - while it is harder to create poetry in russian, I think that once the effort is made, the end result is much more pleasing. Often, because of the necessary effort itself, the end result end up being more complex and sophisticated and.... 'careful'... and much better sounding as well. At least - this is how I feel.

Still, examples to the contrary abound, so I guess it is just personal preference.

On my personal scale, the top would be russian, then french, then the other latin languages (spanish, italian) - then english - then polish - and german at the bottom of the heap (no offense.) There are tons of other languages I never read or heard poetry in, so I cannot really comment on those.

Bu again - if the criteria was how easy it is to write something that rhymes, english would be on the top, by far.

Boidhre · **#64**

Bantari wrote:

palapiku wrote:

Bantari wrote:

English is pretty good... but the best and best sounding sounding poetry I ever heard was in russian. Its a very beautiful language I think, even better for poetry than english. Just my opinion of course.

Russian does have some fantastic poetry. But English is just more versatile. Russian suffers from a much more regular morphology with ubiquitous suffixes - as a result, the rhymes are less varied and overall the language is less terse than English can be. There's just fewer things you can do in a given number of syllables.

This is certainly true, what you say.
However - we have to distinguish here what we mean. Is poetry 'easier' to write in english than in russian? Heck, yeah! Writing things that rhyme in english is snap. In russian not so very much. Same with rhythm and other stuff that goes into making a poem or a song.

But - while it is harder to create poetry in russian, I think that once the effort is made, the end result is much more pleasing. Often, because of the necessary effort itself, the end result end up being more complex and sophisticated and.... 'careful'... and much better sounding as well. At least - this is how I feel.

Still, examples to the contrary abound, so I guess it is just personal preference.

On my personal scale, the top would be russian, then french, then the other latin languages (spanish, italian) - then english - then polish - and german at the bottom of the heap (no offense.) There are tons of other languages I never read or heard poetry in, so I cannot really comment on those.

Bu again - if the criteria was how easy it is to write something that rhymes, english would be on the top, by far.

If you like Russian, you may like older Irish language poetry. The meter is very strict, the language relatively inflexible compared to English, the result is some very skilled work.

An example (academic with a good introduction if you're interested): http://archive.org/stream/bhfuilaguinnd ... 3/mode/2up

jts · **#65**

palapiku wrote:

skydyr wrote:

My impression is that English is currently somewhat poorly suited to poetry, as a great deal of poetry is about working within restriction and modern English poetry seems to be very much about throwing away "artificial" restrictions.

I think that just means modern poetry is poorly suited for poetry.

Contemporary, contemporary. Let's not sully the poor moderns.

It's often easier to appreciate poetry in a foreign language first because (a) you hear the sound before you parse it, whereas the more fluent you are, the less likely you are to notice the sound without deliberate focus, (b) in demotic speech we speak at speeds that slur sounds, rhymes, and meters, (c) you're more likely to be genuinely unsure what sense a word has in a foreign language, and so more attentive to double entendre and metaphor, and (d) you the restrictions of form more if you have more trouble remembering what the poem did say than what it didn't say.

daal · **#66**

jts wrote:

It's often easier to appreciate poetry in a foreign language first because (a) you hear the sound before you parse it, whereas the more fluent you are, the less likely you are to notice the sound without deliberate focus...

Good point. Part of what makes poetry good is simply the pleasing sound of the spoken words, and that probably is easier to notice when one is not fluent. There are many languages I'm not fluent in, but among them, Russian is the only one in which I've memorized poems.

palapiku · **#67**

I think there's more variety possible in English poetry. Sure, poetry needs restrictions, but these restrictions may as well be self-imposed (like rhyme and meter), not imposed by the language.

This is my reasoning for saying English is the best - it quite possibly has the most variety and freedom of any living language.

On the other hand, Russian has been blessed with some really excellent poets, so that helps too. I don't think this is so much due to the language itself as Russian culture.

Also I think being fluent vs non-fluent is a non-issue. If you are not paying attention to sound you are simply not reading poetry properly.

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