I agree of course that there are many languages in which great literature is produced. I just happen to find that books, be it fiction or non-fiction, written by English or American authors, have a very refined way of pleasing the reader.
I don't mean to be rude, but how many other languages do you speak? There's an almost ineffable depth to nearly every language on this earth, and there are hundreds of them with very large literature corpuses. Naturally, maybe speaking two languages, you are familiar only with literature in those languages. Also, remember that English, being spoken by so many people, its literature is naturally more divulged and widely known. Nonetheless there are truly unique characteristics to almost any language, so much that you could fill a lifetime of study in any one of them.
The person you're talking to is German, so the answer is presumably at least two. :-)
I'm a native English speaker, and I've noticed that English writers got much better over time -- ineffable depth be damned. When I read people writing in early modern English, they tend to be... not pleasing to the reader, not near as much as recent authors. And it's not a matter of changing dialects, because I have no trouble fluently reading stuff from a few centuries ago. It just feels like progress has been made in writing techniques. How many other languages, I wonder, have had the chance to undergo this same evolution?
(I have no other languages to compare this to, so take this with many grains of salt.)
Could it instead be that the language that people find pleasing changes over time, so that, as a modern reader, your tastes are naturally more attuned to modern writing?
The genres you list are very popular in the English world. It's fine of course but to use that to argue for a supremacy of English language literature doesn't strike me as a very solid argument. It would be like saying that Comics are superior to Bandes Dessinees because you enjoy super heroes a lot. Or that American cuisine is the best because you love hamburgers, tex mex and slow cooked meat. Nothing wrong with that but it's very subjective.
The American cultural machine is also incredibly powerful so it can impose its themes everywhere around the world, which also leads to this optical effect, you end up using it as the yardstick to judge everybody else's cultural output.
Beyond that I find this entire thread discussing the potential superiority of English literature frankly odd and rather meaningless. Anybody who can take English, French, German, Russian, Japanese and, say, Chinese literature and pick a winner is frankly an idiot. How can you even begin to judge something like that? We're talking about centuries and centuries, thousands of notable writers, millions of pages, hundreds of genres, from poetry to plays to novels to biographies. Who wins, Jacques Prévert or Tolkien? Yukio Mishima or Isaac Assimov? Mikhail Bulgakov or John Grisham? Fernando Pessoa or JK Rowling?
Russian and French 19c literature are the two obvious counter-examples. I admire the attempt to reframe the question in terms that allow you to claim English is pre-eminent though.
So, basically, if they don't have the breadth of literary genres that English does, they're not as good. That's a horrible metric to judge literature and literary value by.
What is your native language? Mine is Polish, for sci-fi I could not enjoy Stanislaw Lem translated to English. On the other hand I really enjoyed translation of H.P. Lovercaft to Polish.
I find Douglas Adams "Hitchhiker's guide to galaxy" lot less funny in Polish. There was also really bad (in my opinion) translation of "Lord of the rings" to Polish which tried to translate proper names, but there was different one which I read and left names unchanged.
I am just thinking how many experiences I am missing while I am not knowing many other languages. Now I live in The Netherlands and learn Dutch, I cannot properly enjoy literature even though I read books, but on my language level everything is bland and I see just words to be understood. So I don't get double meanings like I could already get while reading English.
some people are so earnest to cast aside or denigrate their culture in a display of cosmopolitan/xenophilic signaling
I literally cannot even conceive of a French or Arabic or Chinese or any other language community in the world feeling guilt that maybe their language is too popular and spoken by too many people.
... written by English or American authors, have
a very refined way of pleasing the reader.
Perhaps you could elaborate on that by contrasting how other languages say German authors writing in German approach the reader. Are they more curt or write in a matter-of-fact manner?
How about other non-English language authors?
Please expand if you've had the good fortune of reading fiction / non-fiction in various languages.
I have the impression that basic German is quite technical. You can be poetic, even very poetic, but it is not easy. You can, however, easily describe the relation of one thing to another in detail.
English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German. It is easier to use basic sentences compared to German, but the extended vocabulary is where the fun starts - so many beautiful words for poetic things. It is easy to write an uplifting motivation for any topic. However, I find English harder to use in a technical area. Some part of that may be gaps in my knowledge, but.. things have many names and names point at many things (what is 'gear', for example?), and I lack precise verbs. Just my impression..
> English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German.
According to which method of counting?
Wikipedia says [1] that "One most recent 2016 study shows that 20-year-old English native speakers recognize on average 42,000 lemmas, ranging from 27,100 for the lowest 5% of the population to 51,700 lemmas for the highest 5%." and "For native speakers of German average absolute vocabulary sizes range from 5,900 lemmas in first grade to 73,000 for adults."
In general, I'd expect all languages to have roughly similar vocabulary sizes, since they are mostly limited by the ability of native speakers to remember them.
You're citing information from two different studies that could very well have used different methods for counting lemmas. The text in between the two bits you quoted illustrates the extent to which this is the case: Alongside your study of 20-year-olds finding that they recognize ~42,000 lemmas, there's an earlier study of people about the same age finding that they recognize between 12,000 and 17,000.
The magnitude of that difference (250-300%!) should serve as a stark illustration of just how hazy these estimates are, even within a language.
Between languages, it gets even more difficult. It's very hard, possibly impossible, to come up with a single standard for what counts as a word that doesn't favor one language over another. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if you could engineer a comparison that says that English has more words, and also one that says that German does, simply by changing how you deal with agglutination. Or, if not that, then certainly agglutination and polysemy together.
Hm, that was supposed to be the total count, not for single speakers.
Checking for myself my information seems to have been wrong. As we say here, I take everything back and claim the opposite.. That will teach me not to check my facts I hope.
Hm, I also seem to remember that German has a thinner dictionary. I suspect that lemmas in German are difficult to count, as there are so many compound words. Apart from the joy of teasing fellow Britons for their stupidity, I don't see why an average German adult should recognise 40% more lemmas when the languages are so related.
Wikipedia[1] says there are more words in the German dictionary - but I suppose this depends how you count compound words, and what you take as contemporary words, too.
> I have the impression that basic German is quite technical.
What does this mean?
> English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German.
This may be technically true, but as a user of a language, you are limited by your active vocabulary which is much smaller than the absolute vocabulary in either language. In other words, unless you are deliberately googling for synonyms to insert into your text, the larger vocabulary in English does not affect your ability to express yourself.
