I hope it stays like that forever.
I do as well, only because I'm selfish and really bad at learning languages. Truth be told, I despise the English language, but since it's what I grew up with, it's what I know best. I really wish I had opportunities to learn other languages when I was young enough that doing so would have been easier, because as useful as it is as a lingua franca, I would love to be able to speak and write in many other languages much more than English. Especially write, though. Poetry always sounds so much nicer in other languages.
Why do you despise English?
And which languages?
It just seems to always be blander than it needs to be, as though no matter how rich a vocabulary is used to express an idea, it always results in a much more boring expression than a similar expression would in another language. English writing, especially, tends to lack the succinctness desirable to express emotion, yet at the same time can tend to be
too succinct when it comes to expressing
ideas. I dunno, I'm doing a terrible job explaining what I mean. Maybe I'd do better in French.
I read a fair amount of foreign-language poetry, and when I do I like to search out multiple translations of the same work. Obviously, something is always lost in translation—it's virtually impossible for it not to be—yet when I have some familiarity with the native language of a work, even though it's never enough to read it natively, it always seems to me as though the original authors were able to express themselves much more earnestly than any of their translators. Even the best translation of Rilke's
Buddha in der Glorie cannot compare to the German; nor can English capture the truly magnificent…
Iceland-ness of Stephansson's
Þótt þú Langförull Legðir. This is without even getting into the turns of phrase many languages have that can allude to emotions or thoughts that English has no way to express: the way French can use the gender of its words to evoke multiple meanings of the same word, or the way Japanese can use different readings of kanji to trick a reader into one conclusion about her reading, only to pull the rug out from beneath her feet and force a reevaluation of the entire piece. I have no knowledge of Chinese, unfortunately: for as Tom Scott points out in his
wonderful video on features the English language lacks, Chinese verbs can be time-independent, which sounds like a
fantastic way of writing. Hell, even past iterations of English do some of these things better than we do today: and while you may be able to get away with using Middle English pronouns such as, 'thou,' 'thee,' or 'thine,' in your speech or writing, even if doing so would attract some odd stares, using Old English kennings—a truly beautiful way of expressing oneself through figurative language—would sadly render one unintelligible to most audiences.
On top of all that, I just find the
sound of the English language rather uninspiring. It's far from the worst offender, of course—tonal languages are
much worse for this than English—but there's a certain beauty to many languages' speech that I personally feel English, especially modern English, lacks, which gives foreign-language music and poetry an even nicer edge to it over English.
