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by crazygringo
4666 days ago
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As someone who is a native English speaker, but close to native level in Portuguese (lived in Brazil for 8 years), I'm curious what you mean by English being less expressive -- I've never heard that before. Both languages have their expressive poets, authors, etc. It's easier to rhyme in Portuguese (it's almost like cheating, since the verbs all end in the same syllables), it's easier to modify the grammar classes of words in English (turning nouns into verbs and vice-versa), they both have rich vocabulary (although English seems to give more multiple meanings to individual words, and have more synonyms too). But in the end, I'd never call either of them more expressive than the other... |
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Portuguese, for example, is much more expressive in the sense that you can communicate the same idea in many different ways, which may have different meanings.
There is also the contractions issue and the omission of the subject of an expression ("eu estava" == "eu tava" == "tava" == "I was"), which complicates it even more. And all of this is actually valid, depending on the linguist you "follow". ;)
Well, I did not make myself very clear, but this is what I wanted mean when I talked about expressiveness.
PS: I wanted to write something about linguistic relativity too, but I can't remember, lol.