What do you find are the limitations of the english language?
Posted by admin on January 14, 2008I’m doing book research and I need opinions (From multilingual people) about how the english language compares to other languages in categories like emotional expression, idioms, etc. Also, if you know a word or phrase in a foreign language which the english language doesn’t have a word for, etc, I’d like that information, too.
By: Bea.
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By: Bea.
About the Author:
Posted under English Langauge

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Its harder to describe things in english compared to spanish. Thats why spanish is the language of love. Spanish is more deep and one can describe things much better. One word i can think of is cousin.. in Spanish you can seperate from a female (prima) or male cousin (primo), but in englis when you say cousin you have to state if your talking about male or female.
Kansieo.com
I speak both Spanish and English. And I can express myself- like *exactly what I’m thinking* – much, much better in English.
english language
The Welsh word ‘Hiraeth’ does not have an English equivalent….’longing’, ‘nostalgia’, ‘home-sickness’ don’t quite convey the meaning.
English people also find it difficult to pronounce words like Loch, Bach, Llanelli etc as there is no English equivalent of the ch and ll sounds.
They also find it difficult to pronounce ‘r’…they certainly can’t roll them.
many English people (like Barry in Eggheads) pronounce ‘r’ like ‘ v’.
“Really raunchy reunion” becomes “veally vaunchy veunion.”
Create a video blog…instantly.
English doesn’t have consistent pronunciation with the letters in the words, for example “through, thorough, though, thought” All have “ough” but yield different pronunciations without any rule as to why they are different from one another. Many other languages are consistent with their alphabets and pronunciation, English also doesn’t have the case system which causes English to have a very strict and complicated set of rules for tenses and extremely strict word order. In Russian for example, word order is very flexible and sometimes seemingly arbitrary (can shift around words for different emphasis).
One difference where there really isn’t a translation to English is more of a concept. In Russian, there are no articles at all (“the”, “a”, etc.) and thus no distinction between indefinite and definite articles (difference between: “the car” and “a car”), and in Russian they really don’t even go to make that distinction in concept to concretize nouns. It is just assumed. It is just “car”. However in English there is no means to concretize actions as there is in Russian (difference between perfective and imperfective verbs). The use of a perfective verb serves to convey the meaning that the action has been or will be completed; however, in English we need to add, sometimes even a bunch, of words to what we are saying to convey that meaning, where in Russian it is taken care of often by a prefix being added to the imperfective verb.
With all this being said, English is actually very expressive in the sense that we have an enormous vocabulary at our disposal (easily twice the vocabulary of French and Spanish for example). I find myself many times trying to explain to friends with whom English is a 2nd language, the subtle differences between two words that even if they are synonyms, they somehow convey a slightly, subtle different connotation.
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