Why Is English Better for Poetry Than the Romance Languages? | Big Think
Why Is English Better for Poetry Than the Romance Languages?
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France, Italy, and Spain have their painters; Germany and Italy have their composers; but few countries can challenge England and America when it comes to poets. Trilingual poet Jorie Graham ventures an opinion as to why.
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Jorie Graham:
Jorie Graham is the author of 10 collections of poetry, including The Dream of the Unified Field, which won The Pulitzer Prize. She divides her time between western France and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches at Harvard University. Graham is the first woman to hold the Boylston professorship in the Department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard, a chair with an illustrious lineage dating back to John Quincy Adams. She was the unanimous choice of a special interdepartmental search committee formed to replace Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, who held the position previously.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Question: Why is English better for poetry than the Romance languages?
Jorie Graham: The romance languages are languages that were far more infiltrated by Latin, and the further north you go and the further you go towards the reaches of the empire, the more the vocal language stayed alive in the midst of the Latin, so that if you get as far as England, which was a place that was never conquered entirely by Latin, you have both Anglo-Saxon and Latin present simultaneously, which makes, although the romance languages are very mellifluous and very beautiful, the complexity of the language as it exists in English is unique partly because at a certain point in the British Isles you would have needed both the Latin term and the Anglo-Saxon term for the same object. And Anglo-Saxon terms tend to be less generalizing and more precise so you would have a Latin word for something that would equally true anywhere in the Empire. In other words, the word for justice, and then you would have 14 names for different kinds of buckets used in the field, some are in the British Isles to milk endlessly different creatures and a specific bucket named for each use.
So you have this already very rich pool, and then you bring that language across to the colonies, and you have a very absorptive greedy English language that begins to basically, unlike many romance cultures, happily steal words from Native American languages and Spanish and Dutch and Portuguese and French, a lot of Native American languages in particular and a lot of Spanish. So that, because it is a mercantile culture right from the start, it wants to be able to buy and sell, it needs every language that it can to do so.
So you have an enormous vocabulary influx into the English language. So you have not only the tens of thousands of words invented by people like Shakespeare, but you also have all the fabulous riches of these stolen words that became absorbed into America. Then, unlike French, for example, that loves to keep its language quite pure, you have this language which is not only impure, and increasingly so, it probably absorbs new words every hour of every day, but it also makes it possible, because it is a language that evolved primarily in a society that was attempting and experimenting in the removal of a class system. And it is only an experiment, it still, you will notice in American English that you are allowed to use high and low diction in the same phrase and not feel like you are using an incorrect piece of language. If you were to begin speaking in Italian or French, a person would know within minutes or seconds, not only where in the country you come from, but also, really, what economic or social part of the culture you belong to.
And, so, the American language is incredibly rich. One of the things that they say about America, that Americans have the largest vocabulary of any language that exists on the planet today, but they have the smallest speaking vocabulary.
So when the French get very irritated and say why is English the universal language, there are so few words in it, it is because, on the average, Americans use a tiny percentage of the actual words that are at their disposal in the language. But it makes for an extraordinarily rich language if you are trying to write poetry.
Пікірлер: 58
Romance languages are not infiltrated more by Latin, they are descended from Latin!!!
Lol, didn't know "American" was a language.
@raymoshav-bloodbought
3 жыл бұрын
I think she meant to say American English.
False, Spanish poetry is almost untrasnslatable to English
@richlisola1
4 жыл бұрын
Most poetry doesn’t translate well into any language, this is why translation is such an art form
@VetusBarbatus
4 ай бұрын
No poetry is ultimately translatable. Each person will find the poetry of his mother language the deepest and most meaningful. This lady will never understand how I conceive a poem written in Spanish because she never lived a childhood in Spanish, and the same will happen to me, no matter how I try to improve my English I will never be able to see what an ''English'' person sees when he or she reads Shakespeare.
Oh. man she is so wrong, she is giving a lesson about something she does not know anything about (History). Romance languages are richer gramatically, in english is easier to rime but that is all, for exalmple whe is in english the subjuntive mood? It exist but you don´t use it much, you should more so in poetry
@thomaswhite6866
2 жыл бұрын
Everyone is entitled to her opinion. However the opinions of the well informed merit more respect and consideration than the opinions of the ill informed. I would suggest that no language is no better than any other in any of its communicative fields, including poetry. Have we heard the opinion of a monoglot chauvinistic speaker of a new language “American “.? If English is to be prized because it is a Germanic rootstock onto which Latin has been grafted, then perhaps Romanian should be prized because it is a Romance rootstock onto which Slavic has been grafted. Language chauvinism is as unscientific and socially unacceptable as any other chauvinism.
@thomaswhite6866
2 жыл бұрын
It is disappointing that in light of the speaker’s personal history and knowledge of Italian and French, she has formed her opinions. As to the notion that copious lexical choice erodes social distinction, I would suggest that the opposite is the case. For example in English the word one uses to name the place where one attends to one’s bodily functions such as toilet, lavatory, washroom, cloakroom, w.c. immediately gives clues as to one’s background.
Even if your speaking a romance language your speaking in a poetry way.
¿Una broma?
So wait English is the official international language? Wow!!
The Romance Languages weren’t infiltrated by Latin, they were based on Latin
american language, really??
Las lenguas romances tienen más raíces latinas que el inglés y eso les da más valor
french poetry is far better than english and by far and more complex.
@Michaelvarez
5 жыл бұрын
Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde and many more strongly disagree. English poetry is much more grounded and heartfelt. Far better and complex if I do say so myself.
@pattedechat2457
4 жыл бұрын
@@Michaelvarez Non.
@Pinkie-Red-Studios
4 ай бұрын
@@MichaelvarezShakespeare and Oliver are 100% more theater than poetry. With a “poetic” language which isn’t poetry within itself. Because it isn’t a poem (neither an epic one) - not saying they didn’t write it but they’re not that well considered for these.
Throughout history, every leading civilization has thought and/or claimed that their language was "the" language. In hindsight, we all know what these claims were worth (ask the French on the subject...). Jorie Graham is perfectly entitled to her opinion that English is a better language for poetry than the Romance ones, but it's her opinion, nothing more. I wonder if she ever read Dante...
I think is the complete opposite. In English you couldn't add suffixes to nouns and adjetives like in romance languages like Spanish, and play with perception, mood, word order and metric. For instance English only can say "little old lady", but in Spanish "ancianita","viejita", "vieja pequeñita", "pequeñita anciana", or for dogs, "perro, perrete, perrillo, perrito, perruco, perrucho, perrechuelo, perrín", etc.
And first you say English has a lot of ways of saying everything, but then you say if you listen to a French you can know where the person comes from, so it also has variety now...
The amount of words is not so important for poetry. English, as well as Latin and German, are perhaps best suited for science but the Romance languages were practically born with poetry. Romance writers and poets lived at a time when Latin and Greek were the languages of science (and still are since English uses the Greco-Latin words for most scientific concepts) while the various forms of Vulgar Latin were used for poetic production. Poetic Italian, for example, appears very different from that commonly used due to the fact that the same words can take on different forms and the order of words is freer than in English where the position of words is grammatically more rigid. It is not a question of the number of words but of how the language can be shaped.
Read the title of the video hurt more than the shot that Rimbaud took.
páthetic
English is not better for poetry than any other language...
But the languages in Britain did also come from a common one, Germanic. It's not like there were a lot of different languages and they were all "destroyed" by Latin, there was Germanic and Latin and from a mixture of that come all the actual languages (almost)
Never have I ever heard so much nonsense!!! Olavo Bilac deve estar xingando (em versos milimetricamente rimados) de seu túmulo
And the way you say this, it almost seems English comes from every language and I can't think of those Spanish words you say it has.
No f... idea you have
Laugh in Dante Alighieri
Of course, she is anglo saxon 🤣
I mean almost every European language
BS...
See my comments ,erroneously sent as replies to Roberto Diaz’s comment.
Sooo wrong Italian poetry so fare better and romantic to read I'm not saying is the best language but definitely English poetry are not interesting to read no offence .
Wrong Italian poetry their better than English trust me I really hate English poetry no offence 😂 No voglio dire che l'italiano e fantastico ma non mi piace quelle inglese troppo brutto no offesa 😂😂
The Latin in English comes from the Normans, not the Roman Empire