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4378619 No.4378619[DELETED]  [Reply] [Original]

Which language translates the easiest and most accurately into English?


Pic unrelated

>> No.4378622

American.

>> No.4378632

>>4378622
Is this some kind of anti-American sentiment?

>> No.4378658

Miami Spanish.

>> No.4378673

Languages translate better the closer they are to each other. Not only the words themselves, but the way they are structured. Portuguese and Spanish translate fairly easy, Italian as well but a bit less, French is also not too hard, but I can't say that's easy. When in comes to English, the closest big language is German, but German is already way too different, unlike Portuguese and Spanish.

There is no easy one.

>> No.4378686

>>4378619
None. Being so influenced by both Romance and Germanic, it's too much of each to translate either terribly well.

>> No.4378687

>>4378673
How can the closest "big" language be German, when Spanish and French are easier to translate? You appear to be contradicting yourself there.

>> No.4378696

>>4378686
Question is not 'which language is easy to translate', but '[which] language is the most easily translatable?'

That is, I'm not asking if there is an easy one--but if someone did want to learn a language to translate, which would give the least difficulty and most accuracy.

>> No.4378733

>>4378687
not that person, so i can't explain exactly. but english is a germanic language that has picked up a shit ton of latin of loan words. even though we should be technically closer to german, english speakers actually learn spanish and french in less time (the average to attain conversational fluency is 600 hours for both of those, whereas it's 750 for german). i don't know exactly why that is the case. it might be a reflection of german having a more complex grammar structure than all three of the other languages (including english).

>> No.4378770

>>4378733

true, German still has four cases (being nominative, accusative, dative and, I think, ablative), which makes it more inflected and thus harder to learn.

>> No.4378786

>>4378770
Native German speaker here. I can see what you mean, I had a number of foreign friends who were learning german and had experiance with other languages and had quiet some problems with german grammar and also the cases (nominative, genitive, dative and accusative) as well as some other stuff.
But being a native german speaker it is hard for me to actually rate the difficulty of the language. What I noticed when learning English was, that it was really easy for me, even as a young kid, due to a lot of similar words.

>> No.4378801

>>4378770
genitive instead of ablative. (i didn't know this beforehand, was just reading about the cases after seeing your post).

>> No.4379832

I think either West or North Frisian has the most cognates and stuff with English. It might have a lot of idioms English doesn't, though. I only know a few things about linguistics, so I'm just as interested as you are, OP. But keep in mind that all languages are really Latin, except for Latin, which is really English.

>> No.4379854

>>4378687
Pretty sure he meant, Spanish and Portuguese translate easily to *each other*. Then the other romance languages to a lesser extent.

And with English there is no such family of languages, because English incorporates German, Latin, French, and Gaelic and because of its physical isolation was more prone to divergent linguistic mutations.