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Samuel Beckett, whose first language was English, famously said that he chose to write in French because it allowed him to write “without style,” and made it easier to avoid the flourish and complexity that English allowed him.
Surely part of this must have been simply that Becketts facility with French was less than with English, and perhaps a native French speaker might find a similar benefit from writing in English?
Do some languages really lend themselves more to complexity than others? Why is this?
A friend of mine whose first language is Russian said that oftentimes in English philosophical ideas sound much more interesting, while when translated to Russian they sound obvious and trivial. I don't have any examples to share but this is fascinating.
Does anyone have thoughts on this?
Oct 20 · 8 weeks ago
It's probably more of a problem of individual familiarity with a given language rather than the quality of the language itself. The complexity is not a singular thing: it consists of the vocabulary, the grammar, the common idioms and so on. So even if the grammar is very simple, there's still a lot of room for expression. Though the thing about french in particular is that its historical development has been a lot more top-down than that of English, which would, especially a century or two ago, make it sound a lot more prosaic by comparison.