#e.s de Lego

[hedgehog-moss]

in what ways do you prefer French as a language, and in what ways do you think English is better?

I love how flexible English is, and I love how rigid French is! I know I've talked about this before but these traits always stand out to me and each has my preference in different contexts...

English is blessed with a very complaisant syntax, it often gives you multiple choices with regards to sentence structure, word order, verbal forms, etc, and if you worriedly (Frenchly) ask which one is the right grammatical choice, English speakers will say "Idk, depends on the way you want to say it? on whichever one seems best to you in this context?" (Distraught French speaker: "How can it be up to me? what does the rulebook say?? Which one were you forced to learn by rote in school and recite like a robot?")

English also offers a profusion of monosyllabic words which essentially act as Lego bricks you can stack on top of one another to innovate to your heart's content, it’s amazing. And much harder in French, which has longer base words, often with silent letters at the end, which may or may not need to be pronounced if they end up in the middle of a compound word, where they were never supposed to be... Poets in English love compounding because concision makes a poetic image more vivid (e.e. cummings’ "a watersmooth-silver stallion" obviously has more impact than "a stallion with a silver coat as smooth as water"—the immediacy of the image is what matters.) Fantasy writers love it as well; they can invent words in a really natural-sounding, frictionless way. French translators do their best but can only come up sometimes with a longer, awkward, painfully-hyphenated word because French has much more of a "who do you think you are" approach to inventing new words. (In Lord of the Rings “Dimrill Dale” was translated as “La Vallée des Rigoles Sombres”, “lockholes” as “trous-prisons”...)

French on the other hand is blessed with a very unforgiving syntax with a well-defined framework of rules (and yes, I know, many exceptions, but those are rules under another name), plus a profusion of little grammatical footholds (think: wherein, thus, thereupon...) so as not to lose your grip on the meaning of a long sentence. A badly-structured, pointless sentence in English can hobble along clumsily, tricking you into thinking it's viable until you try to understand the point it's making and are like "... what did i just read"; while this sentence in French would crumple down like a dry sandcastle and refuse to get up until you've made some attempt at fixing it. Usually by making a better use of semantically-weak “tool words” that don’t carry any information but are here to make sure the sentence holds together well. French primary school kids are force-fed these words and the grammatical structures they enable in truly excruciating detail.

So all these rules (and their painstakingly-defined exceptions) provide a solid frame which makes it possible to build long meandering sentences without loss of clarity. English can be more fun because you're swinging from vine to vine at greater speed and with more freedom of movement, but in French which forces you to lay railway tracks for your train of thought, it’s often easier to see how each component connects to others and how it led your thoughts from here to there.

I've found that great writing in English is often taken to mean, a way with language that evokes vivid imagery with simple but powerful words (by powerful I mean instantly evocative—meanwhile ornate, meandering sentences are often perceived as convoluted purple prose), while great writing in French has less to do with imagery and more with the motion of language and how it carries you through feats of momentum and balance. I’m generalising, and not trying to say you don't find both types of writing done well in each language, but overall what English does best is allow your words to convey a wealth of meaning and images in a concise, striking manner, while French makes it easy to swim for a long time before coming up for air, and feel the flow of language around you. I love that English is flexible while French is rigid, and that both are blessings in the hands of a talented writer.