A quick question to non native English writers

Hi, do you guys mind if I ask you a quick question or two?

What is it about English that appeals to you? Why do you think it's better for writing in than your first languages?

Personally, I as a native speaker have always thought English a weird language. A murky conjugation system, words borrowed from tens of other languages, inconsistent spelling and pronunciation rules galore...

However, I do love Old English (because it's simple, yet poetic, and has a distinct rhythm), and in my writing I try to use as few Latinate and Norman-French origin words as I can. It makes Modern English flow beautifully, to cut out all the extras that have been tacked onto it and take it back to its Germanic roots.

 

Unfortunately I've never learnt to speak Flemish - too many of its proponents speak either English or Français to have made the effort I'm afraid. But what is your potential reader population from Nederlands speakers?

English is the most flexible of modern languages - probably the most flexible that has ever existed. More synonyms than any other, from more roots. Actually, it's quite difficult to find a language from which English hasn't - um- adopted a word or two. It has words as soft as Italiano, as harsh as Swiitzerteutsch - probably because that't where it stole them from. For science fiction, it is the language in the forefront of research, it's practical elimination of the second person singular enables immediate recognisable antiquity to dialogue.

Rhythmically it is more germanic than latin, and the rhymes are more rigid than say French, with its unvoiced suffixes, but it's mainly a popular language for poetry because of its huge vocabulary.

Yes, English is my mother tongue and I love it, even if I do tend to overuse its various advantages, at least those I've already mentioned. For there is another benefit to writing in the language of Shakespeare that I am not expecting to win on - it has the largest number of readers of any language on the planet.

 

I've tried to write poetry in German. It didn't work out well. I was going crazy, obsessing over the fact that I couldn't find enough rhyming synonyms, and that Iambic pentameter isn't particularly compatible with some of those hellishly long words.

Finally I just told myself, "Why don't you just write it in English, idiot? You're more familiar with that language, and it actually has a rhythm!"

A great poet I am not, especially in my second language.

 

When translingual poetry is done well, it is not a straight translation, but an adaptation, which means that the central core of the meaning can be modified. I'm no poet myself, a mere wordsmith not an artist, but I have converted a number of songs between English and French, in both directions, and there you are restricted to identical rhythms to the original (and editors accepting the finished work as a reference translation, for legal and copyright restrictions, unlike writing original works), which guarantees the sense and sensibility will change.

When it is 'just' poetry there is more flexibility - the iambic structure which underlies so much of English verse can mutate into the tertiary more common in French, but this won't hold for song.

I wonder if the mediaeval minstrel, already challenged by the change of dialect every twenty miles or so, would shift the tune's rhythms to match the local speech or perform in 'foreign', confident that his audience wasn't listening to the words anyway.