Is there anything better than the English language?

KJV is probably the most quoted piece of literature in existence

I live in a very Christian non-English-speaking county and I, as a fluent English speaker, had never seen Bible quotes in English until recently.

It's the fucking Bible. Every writer and his mother quotes it.
I know anglos are very obnoxious about their literature, but claiming the Bible as their own is just bait-tier.

And of the various versions, the KJV is quoted the most. I'm not trying to claim the Bible, just the translation that has been most influential

Yup, OP.
ENglish is so widely used and not that this is a difficult language.

Yes, OP. Only a brainlet would argue about which language is superior.

It's more likely you didn't recognize them before. I don't know your country, so it's hard to point out specific examples, but the KJV and Shakespeare make up a significant portion of set phrases in English.

English is indeed a stray language, its so easy to learn because its so poor

Good thing I'm trilingual so I don't get stuck in this anglo cesspool

>the US
>not a powerhouse
do nonanglos have any ammunition besides self-denial?

> Come back when English has influenced as many languages as Latin
I'm certain that more languages have borrowed words from English in the last few centuries than from Latin throughout history.
>Proof? [...]
Supposedly the rumor that English has the largest vocab of any language is not true, but logically it makes sense that it would have far more synonyms or near-synonyms than any other language. Other languages may have larger vocabularies and therefore may be more technically precise, but English is very freeform and varried and therefore well-suited to any kind of aesthetic writing.
>Every main language of a relevant country has that. Study more.
I think you'll find that English is the only Indo-European language that doesn't descend from just one parent language. The Romance languages are primarly derived from Latin, Germanic languages from their Germanic parent, Slavic from Slavic, etc., whereas English can claim a much more than trivial influence from both Old Norse and French. We also adapted a ton of words from Latin during the Renaissance, though I don't know if that was happening in other countries or not so I can't compare. Google "inkhorn terms"

It has been the most influential in english literature, no in the broader western one, so don't try to put it in the western canon.
It's the same as when you people claim Shakespeare is as influential in other literatures as he is in english literature, and that we someone praise Shakespeare above our own writers.

>someone
somehow*

You're only showing how ignorant you are with your post.

The Bible in my pic is what is often known as the King James Version or Authorised Version. The KJV had a tremendous influence on English and American literature because it was the Bible used in the Church of England and all of the dissenting churches which immigrated to America such as the Congregationalists, the Quakers, the Baptists, and so on. The prose style is the most majestic bit of writing you can find in English and every writer in English shows its influence either directly or indirectly in the same way that Shakespeare's drama and poetry has its hold on the English vernacular.

My intent certainly was not to claim the Bible for Anglo literature, although I suppose that can't stop a fool from believing whatever he wants.

Here is a petit paean from the good old King James Version for the South American gaucho...

Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.

Proverbs 17:28

A while ago I made a thread or maybe just a post about how starting with the greeks is a meme. Anglos should start with the KJV, Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and then move on to Jane Austen and so on. Glad to see I'm not the only one

> ein weiterer Engländer galuben sie haben die beste Sprache auf der Welt Faden.

Well then, i let myself go with the file name of your pic: "Western Canon". If it's english literature, then i recognize it has been very influential. I just don't think it's part of the Western Canon as a whole.

I actually started a thread with that theme several times and made my pic here The rationale for my pic isn't so much personal taste or intellectualism as their combined influence on popular and intellectual imagination. There was a long time when those 4 books were found on every English-speaker's shelf. The 17th century was when a certain core Anglo identity was formed that unites the various Anglo nations. While Whitman and Poe are very different poets from Tennyson and Browning, all of them share a common influence in Shakespeare, the KJV, Milton, and Bunyan.

Oh, the title was changed for a joke for another thread. I originally called it "The Anglo Canon."

That would just make Anglos more self-centered, less well-rounded thinkers.

Then i apologize for this misunderstanding.

>God Tier: English
The universal lingua franca, and the greatest language in history because it has been the lingua franca so long that all the other languages have become parochial and stagnant by comparison. Can read almost all major things from other languages in translation. Universal language of commerce, philosophy, science, everything.
>Demigod Tier: German
Most important for philosophy, literature, science, and the humanities.
>High Tier: French
Important for literature, somewhat important for philosophy, the rest is negligible.
>Also High Tier: Latin
Gives you access to thousands of years of literature, mostly notably Classical, Renaissance, and Early Modern.
>Mid Tier: Greek, Japanese
Greek is similar to Latin, but much harder, for much fewer texts. Japanese, though relatively minor and insular like the smaller European countries, unlike those countries has maintained an integral history, with an interesting and unique literary tradition since at least the Meiji Restoration. It will also probably change and be productive in this century, unlike languages like Danish which will simply disappear.
>Below Average Tier: Russian, Italian
Despite common perception, very limited canons. Italian writing is of little interest except to specialists, aside from a few great works (like Boccaccio, Dante, Vico). Russian writing seems more voluminous at first, but almost all of it is tepid social reformist drivel from an exciting but spiritually inert age. One outgrows Russian literature when one reaches adulthood and outgrows the bourgeois worldview.
>Low Tier: Spanish
Lots of literature, but most of it bad. Very little of intellectual importance. South and Central America are nearer to Africa than Europe, as civilizations, and Spaniards are filthy layabouts whose spirit peaked and burned out half a millennium ago.
>No Tier: Other European languages
Not worth the time or the trouble. Any truly important authors will be translated, and because of centuries of isolation, these languages are insular, with pathetic vocabularies and a potential for self-expression that hasn't kept up with the modern world. Some of them are so bad that even the locals regularly abandon them for English or Arabic.
>Honorable Mention Tier: Other classical languages, like Sanskrit, Classical Arabic, or antique variants of Persian, Aramaic, Egyptian, etc.
If that's what you're into.

>Joke Tier: Living Arabic
Not a real language. First, Arabs speak dialects, so you will have to learn a dialect. Then you are even worse than if you had learned Swedish. Or slightly better, because at least you can speak Arabic in Sweden.

>Mistaken Tier: Hebrew
Were you looking for the Jews? All those famous intellectual Jews with their Jewish culture? You want German. Hebrew is for Israelis and JAPs from California.

>Very Mistaken Tier: Chinese
It will take 35 years and you still won't be proficient. Also, Chinese people don't read Chinese literature. They read Chinese Youtube comments.

How hard is it for an english speaker to learn german?

Jesus Christ, how awful

I love English language and U.S. so much I feel more drawn to it than to my native language and home country.

Feels badman; I wish I could feel at home somewhere other than my perceived notion of U.S. but I just can't.

>has been the lingua franca so long
Three centuries out of twenty one if we stretch it. Oh so long indeed, my friend.
French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian were lingua francas for similar periods of time, when their respective empires were growing or at their peak.

Regardless, Latin is the only "God Tier" language as it was lingua franca for, what, more than a millenia?

Migrate to US dumbass
If Mexicans can do it, so can you.

you forgot the us marine corps

Is there anything more pleb than reading books in the original language?

>jealous monoglots can only read books in the original language
>patrician polyglots like myself can read the works of Goethe in French, the masterpieces of Proust in the superior Russian, Chinese and Japanese works in the opposite language, etc., opening up new vistas of interpretation and understanding

I tried reading a book in the original language once, just to see what it's like being a pleb, and it was a suffocating and nauseous experience. I pity those for whom there is no other option.

>Paradife Loft

Now what in the fuck?

long s bud

>he doesnt have a room in the paradife loft

Great list I've seen you post before. I still rank Greek and Italian higher than you do.

You're showing how much of a pleb you are.

I am no student or tradesman so I cant. Just low class norwegian working in local Lidl.

>I'm certain that more languages have borrowed words from English in the last few centuries than from Latin throughout history.

Words borrowed from English: facebook, troll, twitter, ok.

>Japanese

Glad to be reminded it's still 4chinz and you're all a bunch of weebs

First of all, how can you argue both A) that English's tendency to borrow from a multiplicity of languages is not special, while also saying B) that other languages have no genuine loan words from English? Check yourself
Second, you're on the right track in that many English loan words have to do with cultural exports. In English, common lexical words are extremely varried in origin, but in the same way that words describing new scientific concepts were and are borrowed into English from Latin, English lends many words to other languages that describe concepts that came from English-dominated sectors, and it isn't just the names of brands and products. Famously, the French have "le weekend" and the Japanese have things like "beisuboru" and "appuru pai." In most languages you have the word "email." I'm monolingual, naturally, and can't think of any others, but those examples should be a good model for what I mean.

wow, a good comment

Why do anglos don't just admit they speak the inferior language? English is so boring and bland that only someone who never bothered to learn another language would disagree.

Romance languages in general are the patrician tier. They are beautiful, aesthetic, complex and descend from Latin which is the language of scholars and intellectuals. That's why operas in French and Italian are more beautiful and prestigious than English operas.

English was only made the lingua franca because anglos are too dumb to learn new languages and their pronunciation is always atrocious.

>I'm monolingual
Yeah, that explains a lot.
Fucking anglos are insuffrable

Naw greeks are essential

I know French and Spanish and they aren't better than English at all

it's a fucking shitty language. It's true there is a lot of great literature written in it, but it pisses me off to no end how inconsistent the language is. There is no way to find out how a word is pronounced purely from its writing, you have to hear someone else pronounce it for you. No wonder so many people are dyslexic here. After 19 years of living in Germany I have not met a single dyslexic person, now that I'm going to uni in the UK, I've met at least 8 people in the past two years alone.

and German has 3 genders that are assigned at random, every language has idiosyncrasies

English's tendency to borrow from other languages is not special at all. Spain and Portugal, for example, were dominated by the Romans, and later the arabs; that small territory had lots of ethnicities - some still have separatists tendencies even today- and the language was greatly influenced by that. Later, the contact with African enriched even more their language.
Every european language borrows from latin/ greek;English does less than French, Itallian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish.
The words borrowed from English are mostly irrelevant, even the examples you have given are. Do you think there is no French word for weekend?
Again, words borrowed from English are mostly connected to foolish cultural trends, bland consumerism,technology or music: blues, jazz, rock, computer, mouse, e-mail, gay, ok et cetera. Even those examples are sometimes exchanged depending on how conservative the country is regarding their language.
The relevant words were borrowed from greek/latin or were already spoken by the native europeans/asians/arabs and others who already had a written language.
Having said that, however, I do believe that English should continue to be the world's language due to its easy structure and importance.

To be fair ,there is no way to tell how to speak just from how the words are written. That is true for any language.

8% of Spanish vocabulary has an Arabic origin, English is an almost even mixture between French and Germanic in vocabulary, and English is accepted as having the largest vocabulary in the world so yes, it is a language rich in words

>sharing the board with retards like this

at this point there is no salvation, just delete this board already

Can you give me a German example? I'm not denying the existence of words that do not abide by German pronunciation rules, but I'm struggling to find one. Once you know the rules (for example, "ie" in German is always pronounced as /i:/(in English phonetics), whereas in English something like "ea" can be pronounced as /i:/ (as in sea), /ɜː/ (as in heard), /e/ (as in head), /eJ/ (as in yea) ) it seems like you could pronounce any German word, whether familiar with it or not. Obviously that does not count for loanwords.

you can tell it was written by an American purely from the dislike towards Spanish and Latin America

You can do that in a lot of languages if you know the rules of pronunciation. English pronunciation rules are all over the place. You can't surely know how to pronounce a word in english.
Don't give that "uh-uh but words are just symbols they don't make a sound" bullshit.

the offset is that English has no genders or cases, it's easy to use verbs

English is a trash language. The words are not pronounced how they are written, there is not concrete rules of vocabulary or pronunciation.

It's disgusting, bih.

I know nothing about German so I can not say how people deal with right/wrong pronunciation.
There are lots of "problems" in the English language as you have pointed, but the language is changed by the speakers. That's why there are differences from state to state without one being correct and the other wrong.
What I meant by not being capable to tell how something is said is that someone who is unfamiliar with a certain language will not be capable to speak even if he knows the signs ( a,b,c ...).
The word hola in Spanish ,fpr instance,would be pronounced as Rowla instead of ola if we follow how words traditionally spoken in English.
The pronounciation of some German words are likely to change due to immigration from African and asian countries.

Thats not bullshit, the sign "a"does not sound the same way it does for all languages.

Other valuable languages: Russian and French.

Secondary valuable languages: Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese.

But English is the most valuable of all.

The most pleb of all.

Fair enough I get your point, we are just talking about two different levels of language then. I should have indicated more clearly that by "knowing how a word is pronounced from the way it is written" that the subject is familiar with the rules of pronunciation of that language and knows how to speak it. In Spanish it seems to me like that the pronunciation rules are fairly consistent too. Once you know the rules of pronunciation, you can apply them to any word in the vocabulary and arrive at the correct pronunciation.

>when Veeky Forums tries to find the "best language"
I told myself I wouldn't return here anymore, but I just had to, I just had to make myself suffer again.

That's not what i meant and you know it.
That "a" would obviously not sound the same in every language, but in a single language, it would sound the same or different depending on certain rules, which is not the case in english.

english is the language of capitalism and industrial revolution

We were talking on different levels indeed. In Spanish these rules are consistent, even though there are some mimor changesin Latin America, what I meant by the example, is that the signs by themselves are meaningless without being associated with a certain set of rules. Your point was that these rules are less strict in the English language,I agree.Again,we were talking about two distinct things.

I have no reason to belive that the influence of Arabic and African languages on Spanish are equvalent to the influences of multiple parent languages on English: I don't doubt that some borrowing went on, but it's clear from all illustrations of the inheritance of languages that English is exceptional. I'm not a linguist: I can't say more. However, I get my information from linguists and I am sure that if you investigated, you would see that I am right. I have no doubht that there is a native French word for weekend, and I'm sure that the academie Francaise is very annoyed that people refuse to use it. The supposed "foolishness" of cultural trends has nothing to do with the viability of English loan words in other languages. The idea that things like email, computers, et al. are "foolish" "trends" is absurd, but if you like, we can look past that: if you feel that pre-20th century loans from English into European languages are somehow more tennable I'm sure we could find a list of those somewhere.

Does it really? This wasn't something you had gathered already? Follow my instructions and leave

The borrowing of words from distinct languages is a good thing when there is not a natiinal term to express that concept. In the case of new technologies or new species of animals, the terms are welcomed. In cases like gay, weekend and other terms borrowed from fast food restaurants, games, hack-journalists and tv series, they are not important because they could have been replaced by words in the nativr language without a loss of meaning.

You said that you have no reason to believe in the relevance of the Arabic language to Spanish. Why would you? Do you know anything about Spanish history and Literature?
Your claim that English is special because it borrowed from many languages is wrong as a lot of other languages did. Terms were taken from the study of Greek/Latin philosophy/poetry/drama/natural sciences. That happened in almost all western european languages, Latin was the language of high culture.
Also, before the 20th century, the importance of the English language was much smaller.

It would a whole lot better if we had an orthography that made any damn sense.

English does have some pronunciation rules that can be followed, particularly for words coming from Latin and Greek. They are, however, not widely publicized and you would have to look in an old book to find them.

The rounded form of minuscule "s" didn't attain common currency until Late Carolingian or "Proto-Gothic" script, and then only at the end of a word. This was par for the course throughout the High Middle Ages (when the Gothic family of scripts were at their most widespread—textura quadrata, rotunda, the various bastardas and secretary hands) and the Renaissance (when Humanist scripts like antiqua bookhand, italic cursive and the chancery hands) started to take over.

Even into early modern period, long ſ was used in the initial or medial position and rounded s in the terminal, or occasionally as the second glyph of a double s (ſs), but this usage was optional (ſſ remained more common, and it's unrelated to German ß which actually comes from and ſz ligature). This was the case for both script (late secretary hands, copperplate cursive) and printed books well into the 18th century.

Prior to the proto-Gothic period, long ſ was the only minuscule form of "S" in all minuscule hands, from the late Roman cursive through the half-uncials and into the quarter-uncial (or "national") hands—Insular, Germanic, Merovingian, Beneventan, Visigothic, and the early Carolingian.

>Global lingua franca

Why is that a badge of pride? Only reason so many people speak English is because it's the lowest common denominator. A drooling retard could communicate using English.

it's far from the easiest language. try again, only next time arm yourself with K N O W L E D G E.

When Old English borrowed words from French, they didn't take words that described new concepts, they replaced or were placed in parallel with existing Old English words, i.e. were not borrowed because they filled gaps in the indigenous language, but simply because French in England at the time had more gravity than Old English itself. Yes, indigenous words in non-English languages could fill the gap that English words like "gay" and "email" occupy, but the force of English has prevailed in those cases. Besides, I think if you actually put some thought into the issue, you'd find that there is no reason synthetically adopted indigenous words are any better than organically adopted foreign words. Besides that, your value-judgements of words and their origins are ridiculous: the claims you make are subjective and baseless, not to mention openly wrong, and you should be embarassed.

You're right, I don't know much about the origins of the Spanish language. However, I do know that English is famous for the diversity of the origins of its vocabulary. Spanish is not. I know linguists who speak languages besides English and who study Indo-European languages broadly, and I know they would tell you that English is a significant outlier in that sense. That said, find me a breakdown equivalent to this chart for Spanish that demonstrates near-equal diversity of origin, and I'll believe you.

Yes, of course they are. That's why you go back to the Greeks after immersing yourself in the common parlance of Anglo culture.

>is being counter colonized by pakis and poo in the loos
>corrupted civilization
>minority in their own capital
>desperately tries to find comfort in being a temporary lingua franca (which will change within decades)
ah, yes, the eternal anglo
please never change

>English is so good you guise, everyone speaks it
No shit everyone speaks it, that's why being born into a native English-speaking country is a drawback language-wise because you'll only master the language everyone else will master anyway (in civilized countries anyway).

But yeah, if you're a monolingual then sure, English is the best.

>Exceptionally nuanced vocabulary
This isn't true. That's how it became
>Global lingua franca

Tried a bit on Duolingo. Not an expert or anything, but most of it felt very natural to me, as an American. The syntax is very similar. I actually got the impression most of it can be guessed intuitively once you know the minimum.

In Quebec they use french for everything. I think weekend is fin de semaine. stop signs say arret. etc. the language police are super strict because there was a time quebec was being invaded by anglo chads who were taking over. language laws and the separation vote have made anglos leave over time.

Yes, language in Quebec is really interesting, especially in comparing Quebec French and European French. Quebec typically uses the term "CV" in place of "resume" for example; I don't remember his name there used to be a Canadian stand-up comic who had a joke about the fact that the Quebecois are so defensive they had to throw out the perfectly good French word "Resume" just because the English were using it

It may be easier to learn a fully functional English vocabulary than with other languages, but the variety of choice you have for single concepts is immense. A language like Chinese might have a larger, more specified vocabulary and would therefore be both harder to learn and more communicative than English, but I'd argue that English can communicate more nuanced meanings through subtle differences between close synonyms than any other language.
I also want to say that because English is so much more analytic than synthetic, things can be articulated in English just as well as in other languages that are the opposite and therefore have larger vocabularies, but I don't have much expertise and so don't really know if that's true/valid or not