/lit/ - Literature

>>4909796
Italian.

>>4909799
*Latin

You'd have to be fluent in many languages to make that judgement.

>>4909809
Nah, I've spent eight years studying Latin. Italian's a more beautiful language and definitely lends itself more to poetry.

>>4909799
>Italian
Top kek

>>4909796
Def. German.

Hesse is proof

>>4909813
Not really, there's a lot of criteria you can check without needing to be fluent in the language
>how a language sounds / lyricism
>vocab
>grammatical structure
>writing system

Klingon

Binary allows you to make your own language as you write

>>4909837
Defenetly this.

>>4909796
Dutch just doesn't have enough words it seems.
I can't really find words like adulation, surreptitious, deleterious, capricious etc., in Dutch. It's all so dull.

>>4909796

Writing poetry in Portuguese (my native language), but reading most of my favorite poets in English (I think that England is the country with the richest literature on average, and the best writer – Shakespeare – although this is just my opinion) and even literary criticism in English, I made a few observations.

Portuguese is a very sweet and sonorous language, and in this department: sonority, it’s superior to English. I don’t know, however, if Portuguese could be deemed better sounding than Spanish, Italian or French. To my ears Italian is possibly the most beautiful language of all. It shares with Portuguese many of its sound effects.

The advantages of English, however, are great. One of them is the easiness in which nouns can be turned into verbs without sounding forced or artificial. In this line of Shakespeare: “O now doth death line his dead chaps with steel;/And now he feasts, mousing the flesh of men” the noun “mouse” is transformed in a verb “mouses”. In Portuguese mouse means “Camundongo”, and the transformation would become something like “Camundonga”, something that would sound strange and unnatural.

Another advantage of English is the simple way of creating words by fusing already existent words. “Alehouse” “Whorehouse” “dragonfly”, etc, etc. I like this simple way of creating new words.

But, in the field of poetry, the greatest advantage of English is the monosyllabic texture of the idiom. This allows English poets to stuff their lines with far more words and meaning than poets of romantic languages, like Portuguese. Let’s imagine a sonnet, 14 lines, and 10 metric beats per line (in English the Iambic Pentameter; in Portuguese the Decassílabo). Now, there is just this amount of space, you can’t use as much space as you want. Now, if you put two skilled poets of both languages to write, the English one is going to have much more space to amaze with his lines, because he can fill them with more substance. There is no way to translate sonnets like this one in 10 metric beats in Portuguese, for the words in my language are too long (although much more sonorous and sweet):

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out, alack, he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.

>>4909796
Best language for technical books is German, for romance French, for poetry it is Gaijin.

Lojban. I don't know why it hasn't been made mandatory for every school yet. It should be the official global language.

>assonant vowel transitions linking slender or broad vowel sounds either side of consonants
>lenition and eclipses to create fricatives and flow
>sandhi effects all up in this bitch
Irish. It's always Ireland.

>>4909796
German
fuck you

>>4909796
French and German

>>4909952
oh wait, you're serious
tip top lel

German

>>4909835
Don't forget morphology. And in that department german is as great as latin is.

>>4909828
>Hesse
>not Heym

>>4909796
german prior to world war 1.
American english, most likely today.
um I also need to know what time period are you speaking of because the meaning of best literature is subjective in and of itself.

>>4909982
>American english
kek

>>4909877
I see some truth in this statement. As a dutch guy by myself, I'm always surprised by the insane amount of emotion-describing words in english.

>>4909992
eh keep the trolling on /b/ please. I'm not upset but your lack of quality posting has me concerned, is it typical for someone to post this poorly here?

>>4909906

Do you ever get bored of posting this stale pasta? Fuck off Portugal.

French is best language.
It was used for diplomatic purposes in the past thanks to all the verbs, connections and accepted deformations of words you can make.
Then the great war and ww2 came and diplomacy became shit (and by that i mean relation between countries) and the english became te universal language. English is shit, its a very direct language and very aggresive sounding.
Not biased btw, spanish parlor here.

>>4910014
>What language lends itself best to literature?
Not what language has the best literature

Also, choosing American English before German, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin..

Like Spanglish but with German instead of English

>>4910030
This.

>>4910034
what sort of literature though? Scientific literature? Romanticism or specific genres in general literature? Literature in and of itself is a vague trivial word, I need a more specific question.

Either German or Dutch.

>>4910030
>not biased
>speaks latin and is defending latin
Lmfao much?

>>4910042
"lends itself best to literature" probably means all kinds

>>4909796
pls

>>4909877
>dulation, surreptitious, deleterious, capricious
Baby's first thesaurus

>>4909796
Both those languages should be fine.

It's just that no one is going to fucking read it if it's in Dutch.

>>4910011
>a dutch guy by myself

>>4910089
Oops

>>4910061
ah thats an easy question then, no language lends itself to all kinds of literature best. Literature has to evolve over time not in a linear darwinian fashion but more of a haphazard mad scientist way.

>>4910106
You can just admit it's Irish. Even drunk it's beautiful.

>>4910123
no, gaelic is the worst next to native american non existant language.

Actualy Irish is anglo saxon drivel. Why would i want to read about some ancient stone age story?

>>4910129
Your language doesn't teach you drinking and pirate songs as children does it? Sorry you were neglected. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtY6mi0oS2w

>>4910106
darwinian fashion is the haphazard mad scientist way though. ain't nothing orderly about it

>>4910167
>aha!

touche however darwinian fashion lacks a language to convey itself in. the comparison I am making still holds because I speak strictly about natures way of doing things versus a crazy person's way of doing things. Nature is not man, nb4 man is part of nature. Man isn't, the notion that man can cause extinctions as slow as natural selection is asinine!

>>4910063
Not really. I've just been reading a lot of nineteenth century novels, and taking some vocabulary training online.

>>4910106
German lends itself best for poetry: it is easy to create new words, or form metaphors with already existing ones - since most german words are metaphors in some way.

>>4910185
If you want to tell me that language is created rather than evolving, then I have to direct you to the number of people that actually adapted to the new world language esperanto.

Language evolves like a species evolves. Prescriptive changes are rarely actually accepted.

ELVISH SINCE THEYRE WAY BETTER THAN HUMANS AT EVERYTHING.

Captcha: fooknom session

>>4910483
i c but that is poetry and not language as a whole.

>>4910575
i-i-is that not good enough, anon-sempai?

>>4910581
NO thanks to you i now have an existential crisis.

>>4910575
Poetry is the greatest form of literature though, evne better when it is epic poetry, so there is that.

I'm partial to the slavic languages myself, czech and polish being the standouts

>>4910612
>polish
my nigger

>you will never have a qt3.14 calligrapher gf

>>4910633
>she will never write her book on your body

>>4910633
>>4910663
You guys have the weirdest fetishes.