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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
by 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 agoPlease stop assuming who I am and what I think and most especially claiming I said things I have not said.