>Ah… to write French you have to know it. English is so plastic—if you haven't got a word you need you can make it, but to write French you have to be an artist like Anatole France.
Is he right /lit/?
>>7929683
He's right but Anatole France is not that great.
It's right, you can't create a new word in French whenever you want it. However Anatole France isn't that bright.
>>7929683
he was an sjw cuck of his day, so fuck him
can you guys explain why you can't just make up new words in French? from a linguistic standpoint?
serious question; To be fair, I have no knowledge of French, but it still pretty much sounds like BS
>>7929752
It's mainly thanks to its short syllables English, along with German, can consolidate new, longer words from small units. For example, if you have the word “bed”, you can quickly create “childbed”, “deathbed” or whatever you like, “hatebed” or “writebed”, even if it makes no sense. English also have a looser orthography—whereas French has a strict one, ruled by a legally entitled institution—and more inflectional morphemes, which allows more creativity on a grammatical point of view. In a single word, you can say “rare”, “rarer”, “rarest”, “rarely”, “rarelier”, “rareliest” and so on, while French will require a specific word. Overall, French is relying on a broader vocabulary with nuances laying either in entirely distinct words or another innate meaning, and not distinct inflections.
However, I pretty much disagree with the idea it has anything to do with quality or “being an artist”. It means it's easier to speak in English.
I can see why a man who never mastered English would think that
>>7929683
He's just pretentious.
Fuck this pretentious French prick.
He's just mad that he can't write well and knows fuck all about literature.
>>7929752
It is BS
You can make up new words in any language. It has nothing to do with linguistics. It is just a matter of tradition and cultural views toward language. The French have long been very militant about the standardization of their language, but there is no objective quality of French or any other language that makes it impossible or even difficult to create new words.
>>7929839
It is completely wrong. You can put random words together in French, it makes no sense.
>>7929861
Well that's not really the point. You can't just randomly slap words together in English either. But new words can be created in both languages.
>>7929879
You can't compare them. James Joyce could never write “In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed childbed, bed of death, ghost-candled” in French, because it almost never occurs two sequences are simply put together like it happens on a daily basis in English or German. The French morphology isn't suited to such a creation, and neologisms are significantly less frequent whatever the way they are formed.
>>7929683
No:
https://books.google.com/books?id=FXystBj82S8C&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=20th+century+french+neologisms&source=bl&ots=F6YoYhISzF&sig=Boxo8uviZFpKteTg_jAuTF9Onh0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjPl8OY95PMAhXENSYKHebNBFwQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=20th%20century%20french%20neologisms&f=false
>this thread
>>7929910
Neologisms may occur less frequently (though I actually don't think that is true) but it has nothing to do with French morphology and everything to do with cultural attitudes toward language
>>7929919
100%
>>7929918
Is English the most unliterary language? Conrad managed to be considered a great author writing in English despite it being his third language.
>>7929943
Explain why it's the most literary language then
>>7930080
>Conrad explained why he did not write in Polish: "I value too much our beautiful Polish literature to introduce into it my worthless twaddle. But for Englishmen my capacities are just sufficient: they enable me to earn my living".
>>7929848
Because illiterates like you abound
lol why so mad Anglos?
It's a fact that you will never get someone like Baudelaire, Balzac or Hugo so you might as well deal with it.
>>7930142
lol u mad that the best french novels in the last 70 years were from an Irishman who decided to write in french for shits and giggles?
>>7930142
Too bad nobody gives a fuck about them.
A thousand Hugo's wouldn't have the status of Shakespeare
>>7930174
You mean that drunken savage who got btfo by Tolstoy?
>>7930142
>balzac
>good
>>7930181
>btfo by Tolstoy
Shows how little you know about the game son
>>7930128
>polish
>literature
desu while i'm unversed in it, it's probably one of the most unrepresented countries in europe or atleast unknown on an international level for literature.
>>7929748
>sjw cuck
get the fuck out of your basement, and this board, too.
>>7930197
http://www.everywritersresource.com/shakespeare-sucks-by-leo-tolstoy/
>>7930150
Go read Céline and come back or something.
>>7930128
LOL how much memespeak exactly needs to be ingrained into your deepest inner thought process before you even stop feeling the need to refrain yourself from making thoughts like this public?
Polish. Fucking Polish.
Polish my fucking dick.
>>7930237
>he thinks celine is better than beckett
ah...the french
>>7930150
What a stupid statement.
>>7930150
>from an Irishman who decided to write in french for shits and giggles
Excusez-toi ?
>They are proud their "language" is more cubersome and less productive.
top jaj, can't never get 'nuff of frogs and gringos being proud of the "mastery" of their languages, like having to do more work to say the same thing is something to be proud of
>>7930239
It's not my fault y'all called him great and then he shat on y'all, Anglos.
>>7930257
He means beckett, dumb continental
>>7930194
not understanding why Balzac is good and what he represents for literature is just embarrassing even if you don't speak french.
>>7930244
Beckett isn't a french writer and it's obvious even in his existential trilogy. Céline is a supperior french writer; artist, I don't know.
Joseph Conrad was a cuck. Disregard anything he says.
>>7930395
Balzac is a second rate platitude monger
>>7930575
nigga is u serious?
he was right, it;'s why french died out and english is now the lingua franca
>>7929919
you're wrong, go fuck yourself.
The morphology and fluidity of syntax of Germanic languages make it incredibly easy to create new words compared to French
The playfulness with the language and capacity for neologisms is something French lacks by definition.
Let's not forget English is the bastard child of 4 different languages, giving it a leg-up in terms of variety
t. je suis français
>>7930577
I value the opinion of Goncourt and Baudelaire more highly than you, anonymous underage shitposter ;)
That being said, Balzac is an amazing storyteller . You can discredit him on his poor writing but tje capacity to create thousands of enthralling characters shows an a truly admirable level of creativty
>>7930461
maybe not but he wrote in the french language. and i don't think its an unpopular opinion that he was a better author than celine.
>>7930617
Goncourt and Boudelaire also like Poe, who was shit
Fuck off with your "muh plot"
>>7930218
And you should see how Orwell utterly wrecks Tolstoy's simpleminded critique of Shakespeare. Read a fucking book, newfag.
>>7930648
this
Poe is pretty much the worst canonic writer
>>7930617
>balzac
>poor writing
are you retarded?
>>7930708
Are you kidding me? He had a huge influence on the Symbolists who in turn influenced every single Modernists. Poe is pretty much the grandpa of modern literature par excellence.
>>7930280
I meant Joyce did just the same with English, you inbred.
>>7930770
Except he didn't and even if he did it would be irrelevant to the conversation you fucking clown
>>7929683
Elizabethan England? Please- I’ll grant you Shakespeare, Milton, & above both- John Donne. Who comes next? No 1 that can reasonably be granted greatness. The assorted Dynastic periods of China? Tu Fu & Li Po I’ll grant, & perhaps Po-Chu-I, but you’re stretching the definition of an age when it spans centuries, & after those 3 you are left with ‘poets’ who wore that appellation about as neatly as a Joyce Carol Oates- most were routine scribes who wrote routine verse. Haiku? Bashō, Buson, Issa- then who? Not to mention that 3 line haikus- even at their best- simply cannot match the depth, complexity, nor music of even a sonnet. Latin American poets in the early-mid 20th Century? There are a few greats- Paz, Neruda, Huidobro come to mind- but most were just political hacks- bumper sticker writers. The French Symbolists? Mallarme & who else? The Romantics? Hmm….England- Shelley, Keats, perhaps Coleridge & Wordsworth. Forget Byron or Clare- the rest fall off a cliff. Perhaps the German Romantics? Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Holderlin, Heine? Puh-leeze! Perhaps the Soviet Era poets of Russia? Pasternak, Mandelstam, & Tsvetaeva are greats, while Akhmadulina, & Akhmatova were pretty good. Don’t even try to make a claim for the propagandist Mayakovsky.
Now, here’s a pretty good list of the major American poets who were writing & came to fame during the 1910-1970 period: Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, Archibald MacLeish, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, e.e. cummings, Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Edwin Rolfe, Charles Olson, Robert Hayden, John Berryman, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Lowell, James Emanuel, W.D Snodgrass, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Anne Sexton, Weldon Kees, & Sylvia Plath come to mind without much effort. & some could argue this list is only ½ or ⅓ its proper length.
>>7931447
>puh-leeze
Was that in the original?
>>7931447
TL;DR
There's a lot of American poets I like
>>7931665
Moby-Dick, however, and Leaves Of Grass are a blueprint for the interplay of ideas, in real time, not as the static little pinpricks of philosophy, or middle-grade didactic art, but as living art, as they change and adapt within a single text, and play upon the mind in far more subtle ways than their predecessors ever could. So, say what great things you will of Rembrandt, Shakespeare, and even a few ancients – the two texts I’ve proffered are still a VERY different animal, and in effect build a self-sustaining universe, with its unique motives and rules, rather than choking on its own regurging mythos.
As for Latin, and its effect on the above theory? Well, there is one thing, thrown out as a kind of monkey-wrench, by Catullus. And it captivates the reader PRECISELY because it shows a man on the cusp of ‘something’ – a flash or realization, a thread that, sadly, he could not follow, a sense of parallax that was simply far beyond him, and the West, as a whole, for another 1500 years. It is this, and it is something no other Western poet would do until they had time to grow up:
#51
He seems to me to be equal to a god,
he, if I dare it, seems to surpass the gods,
who now, face to face, uninterrupted,
watches and hears you
sweetly laughing, which sunders me
from my senses: for when I look at you,
Lesbia, no voice is in my mouth,
my tongue is rigid, and through my body
a thin flame pours down, my ears ringing
with their own sound, my gaze curtained by a double night.
Leisure, Catullus, is dangerous; leisure
urges you to extravagant behavior;
leisure in time gone by has ruined kings
and prosperous cities.
A few predictable things, naturally: Catullus’s sillier infatuations, as per the thrust of his earlier and later poems, a few near-cliches that appear even in the original Latin, and the like. And then – wait, just WHERE did that final stanza come from? From Sappho, whose fragment was rehabilitated into a good poem, here, or from Catullus, himself?
>>7931676
Neither, I’d argue; for it came of Catullus, yes, but only by way of accident. Something ‘clicked’ in him, something that Catullus couldn’t understand, and made its way out, but only in THIS poem. It was a fluke, but what was ‘it’, exactly? Look at the poem again. Then, re-read that last stanza. It is quite Rilkean, a la Archaic Torso Of Apollo, wherein a final line literally comes out of nowhere, but utterly forges the poem into a whole, provides its import, and clarifies everything that came before. Here is, then, something that starts out a little predictable, only to turn to a sweeping philosophical posit that can ring true forever, and granted Rome (or its idea) an eternity that not even its more celebrated poems could not. It is this style of connecting wildly disparate, almost paradoxical ideas that no ancient writer, to my knowledge, ever employed, in any other poem, big or small, to such grand effect, even as #51 seemingly ends on a prosaic, declaratory line that, just as impressively, deepens due to everything that comes before it.
And this is what’s meant in the discussion of Whitman and Melville, above. Catullus does the same thing they’d eventually do, yes, but only in one poem, as if some blueprint in the brain ‘allowed’ it to come out then and there, then blipped out what in the subsequent Dark Ages must have felt like forever. The best modern writers, however, picked such out at will, for they were able to recognize it in their own thoughts, and actively CHOSE to make such sweeping connections – consciously or not! And, again, this is only expected. The circumstances were right. The artists had, after much fiddling, finally become adults. That doesn’t say much for the ancients, no, but it gives them something even more important: a narrative. A sense of place. Usefulness. PURPOSE…
It is not, alas, the purpose they’d imagined for themselves, when Rome was the height of things, ‘eternal’, but, in a weird way, it is somehow grander, too. Rome wanted to be the apex. It wanted to live on and on and on. It wanted, in short, to be the standard of things, forever. Yet this was, no doubt, quite childish, and destructive, to boot, for if Rome had its wish, we’d be in a kind of eternal recurrence, no better than a spider tracing out an ever-lengthening web of the same old shit, unaware – no, worse; UNCARING – that there is some beyond.
>>7931677
I ain't gonna read all that
>>7930617
Goncourt was infamous for having shit opinions.
For one, Proust loved Balzac.
mmAAAAAaahhh the frensh....
>>7930617
>he gets his opinions from others
It's true that you can basically make whatever word you want in English, but you also need to have a fantastic grip of English to be able to pull it off well.
The idea that you could just make up words because you can't think of how to express an idea in extant English is fucking ridiculous.
It's also overselling the ability to make up new words. You can't really do that.
I can say:
>He looked at me with ratstink in his eyes
But 'ratstink' isn't really a new word. A new word should really express a new idea in some way. It shouldn't just smash together two concepts into a word for poetic value. All I'm doing there is abbreviating a simile: he looked at me like a stinking rat.
Which I suppose is the point that is really being made. Presumable because 'ratstink' isn't possible in French you have to say "he looked at me like a smelly rat" which isn't as powerful or interesting. So it has to be re-phrased more intelligently.
To me that sounds like a deficiency in a language. Given the point of language is communicating. The ability to create new meaning within words and phrases that don't technically make sense is a great tool.
>>7931737
>the ability to create new meaning within words and phrases that don't technically make sense is a great tool
It's an easy “tool”. It's harder yet more rewarding to write correctly in French because you need to have a broader vocabulary and to know the slightest meaning each word has and had in the past. You can't rely on synonyms as much as in English and derivation is much less natural. French people have the advantage they are naturally able to discern these nuances.
It takes real talent to write in French.
English is like using Photoshop, French is like using MS Paint.
English is like using a chainsaw, French is like using an axe.
What's more impressive?
>>7932069
I totally disagree. English is indeed easier to write in but it's still equally hard to refine an impressive prose, and even harder because virtually everybody speak English nowadays. I struggle as much in English as I do in the foreign languages I learnt.
To be fair, Anatole France's The Gods Will Have Blood was fucking brilliant. Like the introduction opined, he was one of the few men who was able to create a genuinely good man and a genuinely evil man - but he did it in one novel.
The Procurator of Judea was also one of the better short stories I've read, too.
>>7932081
I won't shut up okay so back the eff off. Look kid, the fact is I live in a detached bungalow and pay rent so low that I almost feel bad for the landlord. My cute half-Russian girlfriend lives here with me and we both study literature at Iowa State, me having earned a three-year paid scholarship in the MFA program and her earning a degree to teach elementary school. I mean I come on this board and see people from Estonia, from New York and from places where their lives for whatever reason, usually economic and romantic, are so depressing that it makes me almost bad for them. I'm almost done editing a 67k word novel a year early, meaning that once its's published by Coffee House Press next Winter I'll have an entire year to promote it and to otherwise spend my time here in Iowa City writing short stories for the weekly class and just enjoying my life. Do you even comprehend the notion of enjoying your life any more kiddo? I thought not. There are people on this board working thirty, forty sometimes fifty hours a week while harboring ambitions of "making it" in literature. Meanwhile I spend my days waking at ten am, eating warm muffins and drinking cups of black coffee on the small wooden red-and-white oilcloth-covered table with my cute, Amelie-esque girlfriend who sits grinning and sipping her cinnamon tea as we discuss our plans for the week or some aspect of our course the other person expresses an interest in learning more about. I own a second-hand Volvo which looks beat up in a way that suggests the exact kind of poverty I'm looking to associate with my "brand" (every contemporary writer needs a brand) and I use it to drive to the library each day where I sit in a thick flannel shirt and sit at a table illuminated by a horizontal rectangular lamp while propping up my forehead with fingers placed to project my studiousness and complexity to others, only to drive home in the evening feeling a calm ease towards my life and walking up the three concrete steps and stepping through the screen door and then the wooden front door to find my qt gf baking in the kitchen with an apron on and a little flour on her cheeks which I rub off as she grins and asks me about my day. What do you have in your life that equates to this? Huh? I'm waiting for an answer...That's what I thought. Literary fame will be mine before the year is through. Meanwhile the rest of your year, and the rest of your life after that, will consist of a slow decline towards an obscure death remarked upon by nobody. I am literally and unironically eating a warm McDonalds cheesburger as I type this, the onions and mustard and tomato ketchup causing me to experience an overwhelming rush of pleasure as I continue to chew and swallow and digest my second meal of the day after a breakfast cooked by an individual to whom I am the love of their life.
>>7932138
I never seen this pasta.
>>7931924
Surely it's much easier to write 'correctly' in French because the lines between correct and incorrect are so well defined?
It just so happens that 'incorrect' English is still perfectly comprehensible a lot of them time and in fact is often better at communicating something. On a logical level a lot of poetic language in English doesn't make much sense.
I wouldn't agree that making up words or using non-standard English is an easy thing to do well. The assumption in the OP's quote is that it's used a lot, but it's not really. It would be basically impossible to translate writers from English to other languages if that were the case. But many are translated well.
Arguing which is better or more impressive is just idiotic. They're just facts about how the two languages work.
If French produced so many beautiful sentences you'd think we'd all jerk off really hard over French writers.. yet we don't. And for the ones we do it's rarely because their prose was so brilliant.
That's not to say one or the other is better, but if the French language forces people to say things perfectly why is Proust about the only fiction prose writer any non-French person quotes?
>>7932195
>Surely it's much easier to write 'correctly' in French because the lines between correct and incorrect are so well defined?
It's harder because you need to know more vocabulary—albeit there are much fewer words than in English—and constantly phrase again the sentences in order to make sense.
>It just so happens that 'incorrect' English is still perfectly comprehensible a lot of them time and in fact is often better at communicating something. On a logical level a lot of poetic language in English doesn't make much sense.
French poetry also rarely makes sense on a logical point of view. Communication in French rather depends on subtle meaning a word carries, which doesn't make it less suited to convey a message. On ther other hand, one could argue using English may alter its meaning by using a wrong, easier synonym.
>I wouldn't agree that making up words or using non-standard English is an easy thing to do well. The assumption in the OP's quote is that it's used a lot, but it's not really. It would be basically impossible to translate writers from English to other languages if that were the case. But many are translated well.
It's often used, and English authors are notoriously difficult to translate. It took decades before James Joyce got translated, and David Foster Wallace still isn't in many languages including French. Jorge Luis Borges despised French, Spanish and Italian were unable to create such neologisms and was admirative of English and German ability to inflect on demand.
>Arguing which is better or more impressive is just idiotic. They're just facts about how the two languages work.
I also keep saying it's ridiculous to consider a language is better than the other. It doesn't mean they work the same way or that one is easier to learn than the other.
>If French produced so many beautiful sentences you'd think we'd all jerk off really hard over French writers.. yet we don't. And for the ones we do it's rarely because their prose was so brilliant. That's not to say one or the other is better, but if the French language forces people to say things perfectly why is Proust about the only fiction prose writer any non-French person quotes?
It may have a lot to do with the fact very few users actually speak French good enough to read literature correctly. Most people I see pretend to read authors they demonstrate no knowledge of or read Albert Camus along with a dictionary.
>>7932195
>why is Proust about the only fiction prose writer any non-French person quotes?
He isn't. You're just VERY uneducated, peasant.
>>7930202
>desu while i'm unversed in it
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann...
