💾 Archived View for osanwe.benson.earth › u › vstrecha › 20 captured on 2024-12-17 at 10:00:15. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Re: "Writing in French vs English: Samuel Beckett"
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.
Oct 25 · 8 weeks ago
Writing in French vs English: Samuel Beckett — 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...