Re: Roots of English language

From: Igor Sklar (yaroslavl_at_gmail.com)
Date: 09/09/04 

Date: 9 Sep 2004 02:53:21 -0700

neoholistic <ekqbwpo@terra.es> wrote in message news:<2q8g8cFsq58sU1@uni-berlin.de>...
> Anti-imperialist Fighter wrote:
>
> >>Spanish sounds, but its vocabulary is much more limited than English - for
> >>example, AFAIK Spanish has only one word, "mal", to use to describe either
> >>bad or evil.
> >
>
> Adjective: malo/a/os/as - also dañino, depravado, maléfico, malicioso,
> maligno, malvado, nocivo, pérfido, perverso, ruin, vil... and lots more.

I suspect that 'ruin' or 'vil' isn't quite the same as 'malo', is it?
In Russian, we have half a dozen general words for bad which are quite
synonymous (plokhoi, durnoi, skvernyi, nekhoroshii, dryannoi,
negodnyi) and innumerable words with adjacent meanings 'evil',
'repulsive', 'abominable', &c (protivnyi, merzkii, otvratitelnyi, zloi
- I could go on for pages).

> Curiously, to both Spanish and Italian speakers, English feels like
> having a fairly limited vocabulary and expresivity.

I know that the Spanish will always defend their language. But to talk
about "fairly limited vocabulary" of English... I don't know. They say
that English has more words (or lemmas) than any other language.

My French teacher used to refer to Spanish disparagingly. He told us
that it's the poorest of Romance languages, and that the Spanish talk
much to say little. He also told us that it's hard to deal with
Spanish businessmen, because they have little use for precise terms.
For instance, when they say "the contract will be signed tomorrow" it
may also stand for "the contract may be signed sometime later".

I don't want to offend anyone. That's what I was told. But I have no
idea if this is correct. No flames please.

regards

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