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I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English. Sure in some languages some concept can be expressed more subtl

I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English. Sure in some languages some concept can be expressed more subtly or poetically, but the concept can be expressed provided the assumed knowledge is present. It is the lack of assumed cultural knowledge that prevents these Japanese expressions from making sense in English, not that they can’t be expressed in English in principle.

sanoli 10y ago
Sure, you can express pretty much any concept from a foreign language in English, and vice-versa if the language is thorough enough. What you lose is the power and conciseness that comes from having a single word expressing a concept that would take 10 or 18 words to be correctly expressd in English. I have memorized a few interesting ones in some languages: 'Litost' (czech), 'Prozvonit' (czech also),'Tartle'(scottish), 'Mamihlapinatapei' (an idiom from Tierra del Fuego), 'Ya’aburnee' (arabic), and my own language's 'saudade', which to some is just translated as 'longing for something you have lost', but is, for native speakers, of course, something else.
- danieltillett 10y ago
  English is very interesting in that if a word makes sense to use (rather than a phrase) then English will borrow that word without hesitation. Actually because the language of science and technology is English there are lots of concepts that can’t be expressed in any other language. Sure any emotion a human can feel can be expressed in any language, but most higher level scientific concepts can’t be expressed in any language other than English. Out of the total number of human concepts that have ever been communicated, the majority are only available to English speakers.
  - mablap 10y ago
    most higher level scientific concepts can’t be expressed in any language other than English. Out of the total number of human concepts that have ever been communicated, the majority are only available to English speakers. Please provide examples to support your baseless claim.
    - danieltillett 10y ago
      Pick any scientific paper at random. No other language other than English has the terms and concepts required to write the paper - you can’t translate most scientific papers into another language since the complete set of terms and concepts don’t exist in any other languages. It is not that you can’t write scientific papers in other languages (many are written in other languages), just that we have settled on English as the language of science. The vast majority of new scientific papers are written in English and hence every new concept within them can’t be expressed in any other language since there are no corresponding vocabulary to map the new concept onto. You can of course make up a new term in an another language if you want, but in this is not done for the many new concepts since it is more productive to just work within English. Of course there are some papers that are written in a foreign language and which contain new concepts. These papers can’t be translated into English without inventing new terms in English. The whole untranslatability issue is purely a numbers game where the papers in English only vastly outnumber those in any other language and hence most of the novel concepts are in English alone.
      - pvaldes 10y ago
        Well, paraphrasing your post... Pick any scientific paper related with biodiversity at random. No other language other than latin (or maybe greek) has the terms and concepts required to write it - you can’t translate Oegopsida or Metasequoia glyptostroboides (Taxodiaceae: Conipherophytina) into english, or another language since the complete set of terms and concepts don’t exist in any other languages. It is not that you can’t write scientific papers in other languages (lots of basic concepts in chemistry or physics developped between 17th and 19th centuries were written and expressed in french and deutsch without any effort), in fact you must use other languages. Consider writing the main parts of your work using math language. There is not much scientific articles or technical ideas developped exclusively in pure english.
        danieltillett 10y ago
        You can't write a modern scientific paper in classical Greek or Latin these days as the vocabulary just doesn't exist in these languages. Sure scientific papers borrow terms from other languages, but today you can really only write most papers in English - the required terminology and concepts are missing from most languages. There really is a world of ideas only accessible in English. As you rightly point out there is nothing about English that makes it suited for science inherently - it is just an accident of history. This does not change the fact that today the language of science is English and hence many scientific ideas are expressed exclusively in English.
  - sanoli 10y ago
    > Out of the total number of human concepts that have ever been communicated, the majority are only available to English speakers. Wait, I'm not sure if I agree with the rest of your post, but this last sentence is surely an exaggeration, no? You mean over 50% of human concepts that were ever communicated are only available to english speakers?
    - danieltillett 10y ago
      Yes because so much of novel human knowledge is tied to science and technology. Sure there are millions of novels, movies, poems, etc in thousands of different languages, but the range of ideas contained within them is rather limited.
      - derriz 10y ago
        You know that English only became a lingua franca in the 20th century? Before that, hardly anything of scientific significance was expressed or published in English? The seminal works in physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology were written in German, Latin, etc
        danieltillett 10y ago
        Yes of course. But since 1945 the vast majority of papers have been written in English. I think people forget how much science has grown over the last 75 years to the point where everything written pre-1945 is a small minority of the scientific literature.
        m00n 10y ago
        Do you think that the ideas of Leibniz and Cauchy, that is differential and integral calculus, of Heisenberg and Einstein, that is Quantum mechanics and Relativity, of Curie, Mendelejew, Hahn, Bosch, ... basically, of any non-english speaking scientist with breakthrough insights, are not understood by English speaking scientists, when translated? What makes you believe people think about concepts "In English", when they are published in English? Certainly Feynman was thinking about QM in English, even though most of the concepts were developed in Norwegian and German. Also, I'm still waiting for a single example of an english named scientific concept, that is not understandable to a German/French expert in the field. Maybe you have at least _one_ example handy, claiming that "most scientific concepts" are of this type.
technomancy 10y ago
> I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English. And all turing-complete programming languages are technically equivalent; what's your point?
- danieltillett 10y ago
  That there is no knowledge that can't be communicated in English. Actually not all languages are equivalent because many concepts can only be expressed in English as all other languages lack the vocabulary to express many scientific and technical concepts. Right now English really is the only language that can be used to express a lot of concepts.
  - Razengan 10y ago
    And most of those scientific and technical words in English are actually borrowed from other languages in the first place. Even the words "science" and "technique" and "compute." Latin and French. Basic stuff like "icon." Greek. "Algebra" and "alcohol" and some other words that start with "al-"; Arabic. I could go on to force the point but it already feels bizarre having to point out the obvious.. If English can wantonly borrow from other languages then pretend it's the only language that can express these things, why can't other languages borrow those words from English and pretend they're a part of them?
    - danieltillett 10y ago
      It is not that you can’t in principle express any concept in any other language, just that in most cases the vocabulary doesn’t exist in that language. In Newton’s time it was not possible to write most scientific papers in English as English lacked the required terms and concepts (everyone wrote in Latin). For a whole series of historical reasons English has become the international language of science resulting in most new concepts only being expressible in English. We could of course change to a new language, but we would need to make up new terms to map all the existing concept onto in this new language. It might happen in the future, but right now there is no major effort to move science from English.
gumby 10y ago
> I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English. That's an extraordinary statement; how many languages do you speak? In my home we speak a melange of three, different ratios depending on who is speaking to whom. And mixed in are other words that my wife or I acquired from other languages used when younger. Some concepts are just simpler or more intense in one language than another. Even though I have been speaking English from birth, use it every day, and live in an English speaking country, there are some things that are simply not natural in it. It would be like trying to write Lisp code using C -- possible (there are lisp compilers that emit C), but painful.
- danieltillett 10y ago
  Do you know of one? I have been looking for one for years and nobody has been able to provide me one. Sure some terms can’t be easily translated into English (especially those that rely on assumed cultural knowledge), but none that I have found can’t be expressed in English. Your Lisp - C analogy is not a bad one (I would have used assembler as the base rather than C). Sure there are some languages that are able to solve some problem more efficiently or elegantly than assembler, but there is no program that can’t (in principle) be written in assembler. There are however many programs that can be written in assembler that can’t be written in Lisp. To continue my provocative thesis then you can think of English as the assembler of human thought :)
  - gumby 10y ago
    > Do you know of one? Of course, I use them all the time. I'll give you a couple of silly, yet profound examples. In German and Marathi there are different words for the droppings (crap) of different animals. In fact in German there's a book that teaches the kids different words. Unlike the highly developed squeamishness of the English language around body functions, you might use one of these words to describe something non-scatalogical (say, some dropped bolts under a piece of machinery) Köttel which includes in one word that they are small, scattered, left by some small creature (i.e. by someone careless or simpleminded -- probably insulting yourself or someone else you're talking about) -- something that can be explained in English but by the time you've done so it's not worth it. Or an example from English: because of the French invasion, English has different words for animals in the field (e.g. swine and pig) and on the table (pork). At home we'll use cow, Kuh, and vache (always humorously) as well as beef or "hamburger" in an English sentence just to emphasize different ways in which the animal is used in different cultures. Agricultural roots are still current German and Marathi in a way not true in English, again due to the Norman invasion. (oh yeah, another great German example is the different words for snot depending on its consistency). German has a rich ontology of earth moving apparatus, and each kind of machine (e.g. Löffelbaggnr) has a descriptive term that even kids know and can understand. If that exists in English I have not seen it (and I've spent some time in construction) except presumably to particular specialists. At the opposite end, in French you can't say shallow (only peu profond -- "a small depth") which has so much semantic richness it makes the term "shallow" shallow. In general, wordplay in English is pretty thin gruel compared to what you can get away with in French, or even German. Speaking of that the very structure of Arabic lets you say things with a richness (kitab vs katib) that is I find (and I have been speaking English in English speaking countries for more than 40 years) inexpressible in English. > To continue my provocative thesis then you can think of English as the assembler of human thought I enjoy speaking English but this statement is hardly true.
swang 10y ago
> I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English. Well, no shit? The only language you speak is English. Any concepts that are foreign or difficult to explain in English would probably be out of your realm of understanding.
- danieltillett 10y ago
  You don't know what languages I speak (other than English of course), but this is irrelevant. It is not if I can find a concept that can not be expressed in English, but if anyone I speak to can come up with one. Do you know of any?
  - m00n 10y ago
    To translate scientific literature is the easiest part of translation. In fact, a lot of papers don't even get translated because everyone can read them after learning 100-200 words from the respective language. I can tell you that most of my time goes by reading scientific papers in languages that are not my mother tongue. The question discussed in this thread is _not_: Would it be beneficial to have all scientific papers in one language? It is: Would it be beneficial to have all literature, discussions, jokes, poems and songs in one language. A question, that Newton's work and the amount of NSF funded papers in 2015 has absolutely no relation to.
    - danieltillett 10y ago
      Do you really think you can understand the concepts in a scientific paper knowing just 200 words of the language they are written in?
      - m00n 10y ago
        In my field of expertise, which is mathematics, this is certainly possible. My French and Russian is bad, to say the least. I doubt I have a vocabulary of more than 200 words in each, but I have no problems reading, for example, EGA [1]. Also there are entire journals in the field publicising translations of articles, which seems to contradict your claim that bleeding-edge scientific concepts are non-translatable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89l%C3%A9ments_de_g%C3%A9om%C3%A9trie_alg%C3%A9brique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89l%C3%A9ments_de_g%C3%A9o...
m00n 10y ago
Some people act so self-entitled, it hurts. Just because you seem to neither have appreciation for beauty nor humanities, doesn't free you from acknowledging it in others. Your premise seems to be that all languages are 'Turing-equivalent': Given enough time+patience you can "explain" the meaning of every expression in every other language. To be honest, a book that wastes my time "explaining" concepts from the language it was originally written in is not a book I would consider fun. I hope you can agree, that describing a feeling is not the same as actually feeling it. But you don't accept that there are words that evoke a feeling in a native speaker, that are not evoked by reading a translation in another language? There are already several examples of phrases in this thread that can only clumsily be explained in English, and some of them are for exactly this reason already used by English speakers. The amount of scientific publications on indivual pieces of literature should also tell you that language as art is more than describing things. Btw, your example of scientific papers is entirely besides the point because their purpose precisely is to just describe something, instead of evoking feelings or images in the readers mind, tapping into his stream of associations/values/lifelong cultural traditions etc. You also claim that _all_ human thoughts in history are "rather limited" when compared to modern "scientific papers". This is trolling, I hope. Finally, the fact that you make out your own language as the lingua franka of all humanity does not do much good to your argument, which has a priori nothing to do with a specific language. Rather, it makes you look stereotypical Western-centric.
- danieltillett 10y ago
  Please stop assuming who I am and what I think and most especially claiming I said things I have not said.

sanoli 10y ago

Sure, you can express pretty much any concept from a foreign language in English, and vice-versa if the language is thorough enough. What you lose is the power and conciseness that comes from having a single word expressing a concept that would take 10 or 18 words to be correctly expressd in English. I have memorized a few interesting ones in some languages: 'Litost' (czech), 'Prozvonit' (czech also),'Tartle'(scottish), 'Mamihlapinatapei' (an idiom from Tierra del Fuego), 'Ya’aburnee' (arabic), and my own language's 'saudade', which to some is just translated as 'longing for something you have lost', but is, for native speakers, of course, something else.

danieltillett 10y ago
English is very interesting in that if a word makes sense to use (rather than a phrase) then English will borrow that word without hesitation. Actually because the language of science and technology is English there are lots of concepts that can’t be expressed in any other language. Sure any emotion a human can feel can be expressed in any language, but most higher level scientific concepts can’t be expressed in any language other than English. Out of the total number of human concepts that have ever been communicated, the majority are only available to English speakers.
- mablap 10y ago
  most higher level scientific concepts can’t be expressed in any language other than English. Out of the total number of human concepts that have ever been communicated, the majority are only available to English speakers. Please provide examples to support your baseless claim.
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    Pick any scientific paper at random. No other language other than English has the terms and concepts required to write the paper - you can’t translate most scientific papers into another language since the complete set of terms and concepts don’t exist in any other languages. It is not that you can’t write scientific papers in other languages (many are written in other languages), just that we have settled on English as the language of science. The vast majority of new scientific papers are written in English and hence every new concept within them can’t be expressed in any other language since there are no corresponding vocabulary to map the new concept onto. You can of course make up a new term in an another language if you want, but in this is not done for the many new concepts since it is more productive to just work within English. Of course there are some papers that are written in a foreign language and which contain new concepts. These papers can’t be translated into English without inventing new terms in English. The whole untranslatability issue is purely a numbers game where the papers in English only vastly outnumber those in any other language and hence most of the novel concepts are in English alone.
    - pvaldes 10y ago
      Well, paraphrasing your post... Pick any scientific paper related with biodiversity at random. No other language other than latin (or maybe greek) has the terms and concepts required to write it - you can’t translate Oegopsida or Metasequoia glyptostroboides (Taxodiaceae: Conipherophytina) into english, or another language since the complete set of terms and concepts don’t exist in any other languages. It is not that you can’t write scientific papers in other languages (lots of basic concepts in chemistry or physics developped between 17th and 19th centuries were written and expressed in french and deutsch without any effort), in fact you must use other languages. Consider writing the main parts of your work using math language. There is not much scientific articles or technical ideas developped exclusively in pure english.
      - danieltillett 10y ago
        You can't write a modern scientific paper in classical Greek or Latin these days as the vocabulary just doesn't exist in these languages. Sure scientific papers borrow terms from other languages, but today you can really only write most papers in English - the required terminology and concepts are missing from most languages. There really is a world of ideas only accessible in English. As you rightly point out there is nothing about English that makes it suited for science inherently - it is just an accident of history. This does not change the fact that today the language of science is English and hence many scientific ideas are expressed exclusively in English.
- sanoli 10y ago
  > Out of the total number of human concepts that have ever been communicated, the majority are only available to English speakers. Wait, I'm not sure if I agree with the rest of your post, but this last sentence is surely an exaggeration, no? You mean over 50% of human concepts that were ever communicated are only available to english speakers?
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    Yes because so much of novel human knowledge is tied to science and technology. Sure there are millions of novels, movies, poems, etc in thousands of different languages, but the range of ideas contained within them is rather limited.
    - derriz 10y ago
      You know that English only became a lingua franca in the 20th century? Before that, hardly anything of scientific significance was expressed or published in English? The seminal works in physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology were written in German, Latin, etc
      - danieltillett 10y ago
        Yes of course. But since 1945 the vast majority of papers have been written in English. I think people forget how much science has grown over the last 75 years to the point where everything written pre-1945 is a small minority of the scientific literature.
        m00n 10y ago
        Do you think that the ideas of Leibniz and Cauchy, that is differential and integral calculus, of Heisenberg and Einstein, that is Quantum mechanics and Relativity, of Curie, Mendelejew, Hahn, Bosch, ... basically, of any non-english speaking scientist with breakthrough insights, are not understood by English speaking scientists, when translated? What makes you believe people think about concepts "In English", when they are published in English? Certainly Feynman was thinking about QM in English, even though most of the concepts were developed in Norwegian and German. Also, I'm still waiting for a single example of an english named scientific concept, that is not understandable to a German/French expert in the field. Maybe you have at least _one_ example handy, claiming that "most scientific concepts" are of this type.

technomancy 10y ago

> I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English. And all turing-complete programming languages are technically equivalent; what's your point?

danieltillett 10y ago
That there is no knowledge that can't be communicated in English. Actually not all languages are equivalent because many concepts can only be expressed in English as all other languages lack the vocabulary to express many scientific and technical concepts. Right now English really is the only language that can be used to express a lot of concepts.
- Razengan 10y ago
  And most of those scientific and technical words in English are actually borrowed from other languages in the first place. Even the words "science" and "technique" and "compute." Latin and French. Basic stuff like "icon." Greek. "Algebra" and "alcohol" and some other words that start with "al-"; Arabic. I could go on to force the point but it already feels bizarre having to point out the obvious.. If English can wantonly borrow from other languages then pretend it's the only language that can express these things, why can't other languages borrow those words from English and pretend they're a part of them?
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    It is not that you can’t in principle express any concept in any other language, just that in most cases the vocabulary doesn’t exist in that language. In Newton’s time it was not possible to write most scientific papers in English as English lacked the required terms and concepts (everyone wrote in Latin). For a whole series of historical reasons English has become the international language of science resulting in most new concepts only being expressible in English. We could of course change to a new language, but we would need to make up new terms to map all the existing concept onto in this new language. It might happen in the future, but right now there is no major effort to move science from English.

gumby 10y ago

> I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English. That's an extraordinary statement; how many languages do you speak? In my home we speak a melange of three, different ratios depending on who is speaking to whom. And mixed in are other words that my wife or I acquired from other languages used when younger. Some concepts are just simpler or more intense in one language than another. Even though I have been speaking English from birth, use it every day, and live in an English speaking country, there are some things that are simply not natural in it. It would be like trying to write Lisp code using C -- possible (there are lisp compilers that emit C), but painful.

danieltillett 10y ago
Do you know of one? I have been looking for one for years and nobody has been able to provide me one. Sure some terms can’t be easily translated into English (especially those that rely on assumed cultural knowledge), but none that I have found can’t be expressed in English. Your Lisp - C analogy is not a bad one (I would have used assembler as the base rather than C). Sure there are some languages that are able to solve some problem more efficiently or elegantly than assembler, but there is no program that can’t (in principle) be written in assembler. There are however many programs that can be written in assembler that can’t be written in Lisp. To continue my provocative thesis then you can think of English as the assembler of human thought :)
- gumby 10y ago
  > Do you know of one? Of course, I use them all the time. I'll give you a couple of silly, yet profound examples. In German and Marathi there are different words for the droppings (crap) of different animals. In fact in German there's a book that teaches the kids different words. Unlike the highly developed squeamishness of the English language around body functions, you might use one of these words to describe something non-scatalogical (say, some dropped bolts under a piece of machinery) Köttel which includes in one word that they are small, scattered, left by some small creature (i.e. by someone careless or simpleminded -- probably insulting yourself or someone else you're talking about) -- something that can be explained in English but by the time you've done so it's not worth it. Or an example from English: because of the French invasion, English has different words for animals in the field (e.g. swine and pig) and on the table (pork). At home we'll use cow, Kuh, and vache (always humorously) as well as beef or "hamburger" in an English sentence just to emphasize different ways in which the animal is used in different cultures. Agricultural roots are still current German and Marathi in a way not true in English, again due to the Norman invasion. (oh yeah, another great German example is the different words for snot depending on its consistency). German has a rich ontology of earth moving apparatus, and each kind of machine (e.g. Löffelbaggnr) has a descriptive term that even kids know and can understand. If that exists in English I have not seen it (and I've spent some time in construction) except presumably to particular specialists. At the opposite end, in French you can't say shallow (only peu profond -- "a small depth") which has so much semantic richness it makes the term "shallow" shallow. In general, wordplay in English is pretty thin gruel compared to what you can get away with in French, or even German. Speaking of that the very structure of Arabic lets you say things with a richness (kitab vs katib) that is I find (and I have been speaking English in English speaking countries for more than 40 years) inexpressible in English. > To continue my provocative thesis then you can think of English as the assembler of human thought I enjoy speaking English but this statement is hardly true.

swang 10y ago

> I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English. Well, no shit? The only language you speak is English. Any concepts that are foreign or difficult to explain in English would probably be out of your realm of understanding.

danieltillett 10y ago
You don't know what languages I speak (other than English of course), but this is irrelevant. It is not if I can find a concept that can not be expressed in English, but if anyone I speak to can come up with one. Do you know of any?
- m00n 10y ago
  To translate scientific literature is the easiest part of translation. In fact, a lot of papers don't even get translated because everyone can read them after learning 100-200 words from the respective language. I can tell you that most of my time goes by reading scientific papers in languages that are not my mother tongue. The question discussed in this thread is _not_: Would it be beneficial to have all scientific papers in one language? It is: Would it be beneficial to have all literature, discussions, jokes, poems and songs in one language. A question, that Newton's work and the amount of NSF funded papers in 2015 has absolutely no relation to.
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    Do you really think you can understand the concepts in a scientific paper knowing just 200 words of the language they are written in?
    - m00n 10y ago
      In my field of expertise, which is mathematics, this is certainly possible. My French and Russian is bad, to say the least. I doubt I have a vocabulary of more than 200 words in each, but I have no problems reading, for example, EGA [1]. Also there are entire journals in the field publicising translations of articles, which seems to contradict your claim that bleeding-edge scientific concepts are non-translatable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89l%C3%A9ments_de_g%C3%A9om%C3%A9trie_alg%C3%A9brique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89l%C3%A9ments_de_g%C3%A9o...

m00n 10y ago

Some people act so self-entitled, it hurts. Just because you seem to neither have appreciation for beauty nor humanities, doesn't free you from acknowledging it in others. Your premise seems to be that all languages are 'Turing-equivalent': Given enough time+patience you can "explain" the meaning of every expression in every other language. To be honest, a book that wastes my time "explaining" concepts from the language it was originally written in is not a book I would consider fun. I hope you can agree, that describing a feeling is not the same as actually feeling it. But you don't accept that there are words that evoke a feeling in a native speaker, that are not evoked by reading a translation in another language? There are already several examples of phrases in this thread that can only clumsily be explained in English, and some of them are for exactly this reason already used by English speakers. The amount of scientific publications on indivual pieces of literature should also tell you that language as art is more than describing things. Btw, your example of scientific papers is entirely besides the point because their purpose precisely is to just describe something, instead of evoking feelings or images in the readers mind, tapping into his stream of associations/values/lifelong cultural traditions etc. You also claim that _all_ human thoughts in history are "rather limited" when compared to modern "scientific papers". This is trolling, I hope. Finally, the fact that you make out your own language as the lingua franka of all humanity does not do much good to your argument, which has a priori nothing to do with a specific language. Rather, it makes you look stereotypical Western-centric.

danieltillett 10y ago
Please stop assuming who I am and what I think and most especially claiming I said things I have not said.