/lit/ - Literature

>essential literary language
>italian

Definitely not Italian

french and russian
italian what the fuck?

uhhh french and russian

HELLO? MCFLY? DO YOU HEAR ME?

german and french

I personally would want to learn French and Japanese for literary purposes.

>>1067769
what is your basis for saying german? i have yet to read much besides the philosophers and goethe

English is the only true essential language because everything is being translated into our master race language

besides english i would learn korean and japanese. i probably should learn british though. fucking favoUrite and theatRE i mean what the hell are they saying?

i'd say russian and french

Latin

German is incredibly similar to English, so unless you really care about German lit it's not going to be hugely beneficial. Russian is actually also very similar to English, structurally, but obviously it uses Cyrllic not Roman and a totally different vocabulary. I don't know enough Russian to make a judgment on whether or not it's worth it. I don't think it sounds beautifully aesthetically so I see no reason to not read an English translation instead.

tl;dr Definitely French, and probably Russian of the four choices. Spanish is becoming more important but it's really similar to French anyways.

Spanish and now Chinese. Better get used to reading Mandarin because you'll be doing a lot of it in like ten years.

>>1067795
Probably not. You can't read Mandarin either, it's Hanzi

>>1067795

ohyou.jpg

>>1067800
I'll trust you. The most important literary languages to learn are always the ones that are the most dominant socially. Latin forever ago, then Spanish, English, and it makes sense that SOMETHING Chinese will follow.

>>1067782
Why does similarity matter at all? Knowing English doesn't allow one to read German, so why not learn German just because of the structural similarity?

If anything, it should make a language a better choice, because it will be easier to learn.

French and Russian. German is probably third.

OP, what made you choose Italian? I mean, outside of the Divine Comedy and some of Eco's stuff, there's really not much world-renowned Italian literature.

>>1067772
>>1067779
>japanese
>korean
>literature

Goethe was German, so German.

>>1067761

>Dante, Boccaccio, etc.
>not essential

>>1067782
>German
>similar to English

wat?
I'm a native german-speaker, and i can't really see a huge conformity.

I think OP meant latin.

>>1067815
Because it's just a huge vocabulary. Unless it's much more aesthetically pleasing it won't be much of a new experience unless you have a reason to actually use it. That'd be like simply replacing all your words in an English book with totally different ones, but with identical meanings. What's the point?

>>1067832
This is a common fallacious claim by people who don't speak a damn word of German.
Modern-day English actually has more lexical similarity with French due to the Norman Invasion.

>>1067836
The thread is about learning a language for its literary merit (i.e., the importance of works in the language). I don't think novelty is of that much value in choosing a language to learn.

>>1067812
When was Spanish the dominant language in literature? None of that is really true at all. French was considered by plenty of English writers to be a more beautiful language, modernists were huge in Paris. It wasn't because it was the most widely spoken language. Latin was more read than actually spoken as far as literature goes, it was simply universally understood by academics. English is a much more dominant language than Chinese because it's the second language for a majority of the world. I can read hanzi alright and speak Mandarin alright and frankly it's an ugly, ugly language. It is not at all made for writing literature, it reads like a programming language. I would never want to read anything Chinese by choice.

>>1067821
are you dense? don't judge unless you've read and by read i mean more than murakami (although i like him too). actually japs have tons of great authors. two that are nobel winning authors that i know of. kawabata and oe. oe's the silent cry is every bit as beautiful and violent as anything i've read by an english author. and snow country by kawabata will break your heart.

and really- my fave jap authors didn't win a nobel. there are lots of great ones. unfortunately the japs burned an insane amount of korean classic lit when they occupied korea so there is little to look into.

just gtfo since 4chan is an 18+ board.

>>1067782

>German is incredibly similar to English, so unless you really care about German lit it's not going to be hugely beneficial. Russian is actually also very similar to English, structurally, but obviously it uses Cyrllic not Roman and a totally different vocabulary. I don't know enough Russian to make a judgment on whether or not it's worth it. I don't think it sounds beautifully aesthetically so I see no reason to not read an English translation instead.

In this post: someone who doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.

>>1067841
And a common factual claim by linguists. Its vocabulary has more to do with French, the language doesn't.

>>1067856
Yeah, but syntactic structure is just one of many aspects to a language. Pick up a newspaper in each language if you don't speak either, and I guarantee you'll understand more of the French one.

>>1067856

No, you're wrong on that point too. English and German grammar are very different. Kafka would write sentences a page long with the crucial verb ignored until the very end. English can't do anything like that.

>>1067852
u mad weeaboo scum

>>1067859
>>1067856
The vocabulary is pretty damn similar too, isn't there that table showing a 50% linguistic similarity for English and German words?

>>1067862
Your silly anecdote aside: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Germanic_languages

>>1067867
Italian and French are similar.
Spanish and French are similar.
English and German are NOT similar.

>>1067862

"Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt" is not a page long

>>1067876
Yeah I guess you're right, thanks for the compelling argument. There is not a more similar language to English in common use today (obviously Scottish but it's dying).

>>1067867
Na, klingt das nach Englisch für dich?
Well, I don't think so.

>>1067871

i am not him but you're a dumb image macro faggot and while i assume you're too far gone to be anything but ignored this is a message to all the other banal homos who see your post and are considering following your example: this board is fucking sundown town for dumb cocksuckers so pack your shit and move on to SA or Fark

>>1067871
i'm not mad. when you're well-read you're supposed to be someone who is at least familiar with literature from a variety of places. you aren't and therefore your opinions are worthless including your one about myself.

>>1067849
It's a matter of the speaking population. Chinese is the most widely spoken language on earth, so more Chinese will be read and written. It could just be a matter of decades before most of the greats are coming out of decades.

Spanish was the dominant language all over the world for three hundred years. You think no one read the religious and political thinkers that popped up all over the place once the encomienda got rolling? Letters and philosophical tracts defined the living conditions of half the world to this day. Latin has a wider influence, but the principal remains the same.

>>1067883
shit just got pathetic

>>1067886
out of China, sorry.

>>1067869

Again, what's your point? You think I didn't know that?

English and German are very different. And my example isn't silly at all (nor is it unique to Kafka).

>>1067880

Scots is the closest but Frisian is also very close. But we're talking about origin here, not similarity. An English-speaker can understand way more French than he can Frisian.

>>1067887
why? for telling someone not to give an opinion on what they're obviously not familiar with? fuck off with my antisage.

>>1067894
yeah well yo momma

>>1067882
>>1067883
I realize where you're coming from but you can't seriously think Japanese or Korean is more worthwhile learning for literary purposes then Russian or French now can you, <insert generic insults like the ones you used on me>

>>1067900
its yea u an ur mom

Is manga literature

>>1067892
What? We are absolutely not talking about origin. German is well-known to be similar to English, more so than any other language. The link you were provided documents some ways in which that's true.

Your repeated example of an English-speaker understanding French more easily has more to do with the number of cognates in the vocabulary, and doesn't really prove your point. If you want to keep arguing it, could you please point to a source that agrees with your claim?

Remember when /lit/ was good? That was a good two months.

>>1067908
It's also patently false, there are more German-English cognates than French-English. I'll find a source.

>>1067912
So if Geman has more English cognates, and the grammar is more similar as well--how would an English speaker understand French more readily?

>>1067912
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=eng
>Lexical similarity: 60% with German, 27% with French, 24% with Russian.

>>1067918
He wouldn't, I was agreeing with you.

>>1067908

Jesus fucking christ bro. You originally said:

>German is incredibly similar to English, so unless you really care about German lit it's not going to be hugely beneficial.

You were implying that the fact that German and English are "similar" (in origin, in grammar, in vocabulary to a certain extent) meant that you could get by on English translations of German works without losing much.

This isn't true, though. While, yes, German and English are very "similar" (depending on how you're measuring similarity), they're different enough that a LOT is lost in translation. For one thing, German can do things with sentence structure that English, because of its lack of inflection, is literally incapable of doing.

I can't "prove" how different they are to you because you don't fucking know German, and if you did I wouldn't need to prove it to you.

Now I'm done.

>>1067912
>>1067919

Ich nehme an dass Englisch deine Muttersprache ist, demnach müsstest du mich - wenn auch nur brachial - verstehen können.

>>1067902
generic insults? because calling someone a meme like weeaboo isn't generic right?

anyways why are there people who study classic jap lit? there are majors for this in lots of colleges. why? because outside of manga they really do have books without pictures. check 'em out sometime. that's all i ask. the variety of their literature is just as much as you'd find anywhere else.

>>1067926
No, I'm not that guy. In fact, I was arguing WITH that guy.

The incredible genius of anonymous posting strikes again.

>>1067926
So German and English are similar. But they're different in some ways, so they're not similar. Well argued.

None of this is relevant to the topic at hand, of course.

Russian and....Latin.

>>1067930
So what exactly is your argument then? Yes, I'm a native English speaker and it's much easier to understand German than it is French. Does this one anecdote from an actual speaker make up for your wild assumptions that it would just be "easier" to understand French?

>>1067934
Right I'm not saying there aren't rare gems but to say Japanese is better to learn than French or Russian for literary purposes is retarded

>>1067919

Different analyses have given different results, actually. In ordinary speech, Germanic words are more common. In more formal writing, French/Latin words are more common.

From wikipedia (it's sourced there I'll give link):
>A computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd ed.) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff (1973)[85] that estimated the origin of English words as follows:
>* Langue d'oïl, including French and Old Norman: 28.3%
>* Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
>* Other Germanic languages (including words directly inherited from Old English; does not include Germanic words coming from the Germanic element in French, Latin or other Romance languages): 25%
>* Greek: 5.32%
>* No etymology given: 4.03%
>* Derived from proper names: 3.28%
>* All other languages: less than 1%

Or another analysis:

>A survey by Joseph M. Williams in Origins of the English Language of 10,000 words taken from several thousand business letters gave this set of statistics:[86]

>* French (langue d'oïl): 41%
>* "Native" English: 33%
>* Latin: 15%
>* Old Norse: 2%
>* Dutch: 1%
>* Other: 10%

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Word_origins

>>1067944

You're either willfully misunderstanding my argument or you're stupid.

>>1067950
and i will disrespectfully disagree everytime, asshole. that's all i'm saying. opinions.

>What are the two most essential literary languages besides English?

Such a fucking pointless question.

OK, back to the topic...
I'm Spanish, and I really enjoy reading it (obvious), but I think you should learn one Romance language, like Spanish, Italian or French. The beauty in the Romance languages ( for me) is far better than English.