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> I suspect all commonly used modern languages are English complete... English is just one language, and while perhaps unusually expressive because of the amou
by astrodust 9y ago
> I suspect all commonly used modern languages are English complete...
English is just one language, and while perhaps unusually expressive because of the amount of abuse it's received over the centuries, plus its ability to wholesale absorb new words on a whim, it is incapable of expressing some things with the same degree of succinctness and precision other languages have.
There are words in other languages that take a paragraph to explain in English because of all the cultural context they contain, or because they refer to things that most people who speak English have never seen, nor felt a need to describe with that degree of precision.
The problem with using English as a basis is it's very hard to explain in English what the language is incapable of expressing. This is like a fish trying to explain what they can do on land when the very concept of land is hazy at best.