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During my first year as a student at University I stumbled upon the book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke in the philosophy section. It was

During my first year as a student at University I stumbled upon the book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke in the philosophy section. It was the critical edition by Peter Nidditch, beautifully typeset and bound. I flipped through it and the style of English looked intriguing so I took the book out. I spent about a month reading through it and when I finally finished it I felt like it had profoundly changed my way of thinking and moved me deeply. It also made me never want to read another "summary" or anything but the original work of a philosopher ever again. It's very hard to explain or understand if you haven't experienced it yourself. I feel the same way after reading Schopenhauer, although I've never had the privilege of reading him in German. The translations by Saunders is so amazingly good in English and I've read that Schopenhauer's German is a real delight, so I can't even imagine how good it must be to read him in the original. But I imagine it would be something as beautiful and touching as Locke if you're a native English speaker.

goodjam 10y ago
German is very suitable for abstract thinking because you can form compound words with ease and put the function at the end of the sentence. These compound words are hard to translate (aufhebung - sublation is a famous example). Hegel wrote about this in his Logic. German is like a different programming paradigm compared to English.
- mannykannot 10y ago
  That is a very Whorfian view, but McWhorter, among others, would question whether it is at all plausible that these differences in what is little more than syntax can really make a profound difference in meaning. To put it another way, if these language features do make that much of a difference, then is there much more to these texts than a self-referential discussion of the meaning of the language used in these texts? Your programming-paradigm analogy is perhaps unintentionally apt, as underneath their particular representations, they are all Turing-equivalent.
  - VLM 10y ago
    Program languages can be Turing equivalent however an alternative view of language is its like any other data encoding and via some kinds of Shannon's Law for human speech your language has to be able to achieve a certain SNR equivalent minimum to get an idea across in a small slice of a lifetime devoted to a book at a reasonably low enough error rate to claim a meeting of the minds on a topic. So you can write Kant in German and maybe its possible to understand an English translation of Kant with a bit more effort but there exists a hard lower SNR limit below which it doesnt work such that a Lojban translation of Kant is simply a fliba. Note that its difficult to find a Lojban-English dictionary that isn't also an English thesaurus in practice. There are indications Kant could be translated into Esperanto but nobodies tried in public, or maybe because its also quite impossible. Now as a counter example (or is it?) see the whole concept of "a quran isn't a quran unless its written in arabic at which point its a real quran" vs the similar fun the pre-reformation christians had with the same belief WRT the new testament.
    - mannykannot 10y ago
      That is a very interesting point, but I wonder if Lojban's avoidance of ambiguity is the root of the translation difficulty - I doubt that Kant is unambiguous. I think the quran and new testament issues arise from theology, not linguistics.
- osullivj 10y ago
  Stack based, and concatenative, like Forth.

goodjam 10y ago

German is very suitable for abstract thinking because you can form compound words with ease and put the function at the end of the sentence. These compound words are hard to translate (aufhebung - sublation is a famous example). Hegel wrote about this in his Logic. German is like a different programming paradigm compared to English.

mannykannot 10y ago
That is a very Whorfian view, but McWhorter, among others, would question whether it is at all plausible that these differences in what is little more than syntax can really make a profound difference in meaning. To put it another way, if these language features do make that much of a difference, then is there much more to these texts than a self-referential discussion of the meaning of the language used in these texts? Your programming-paradigm analogy is perhaps unintentionally apt, as underneath their particular representations, they are all Turing-equivalent.
- VLM 10y ago
  Program languages can be Turing equivalent however an alternative view of language is its like any other data encoding and via some kinds of Shannon's Law for human speech your language has to be able to achieve a certain SNR equivalent minimum to get an idea across in a small slice of a lifetime devoted to a book at a reasonably low enough error rate to claim a meeting of the minds on a topic. So you can write Kant in German and maybe its possible to understand an English translation of Kant with a bit more effort but there exists a hard lower SNR limit below which it doesnt work such that a Lojban translation of Kant is simply a fliba. Note that its difficult to find a Lojban-English dictionary that isn't also an English thesaurus in practice. There are indications Kant could be translated into Esperanto but nobodies tried in public, or maybe because its also quite impossible. Now as a counter example (or is it?) see the whole concept of "a quran isn't a quran unless its written in arabic at which point its a real quran" vs the similar fun the pre-reformation christians had with the same belief WRT the new testament.
  - mannykannot 10y ago
    That is a very interesting point, but I wonder if Lojban's avoidance of ambiguity is the root of the translation difficulty - I doubt that Kant is unambiguous. I think the quran and new testament issues arise from theology, not linguistics.
osullivj 10y ago
Stack based, and concatenative, like Forth.