The comments below mention Sapir-Whorf but personally as a bilingual person I think Sapir-Whorf is a load of bull. It's not so much that the languages themselve

The comments below mention Sapir-Whorf but personally as a bilingual person I think Sapir-Whorf is a load of bull. It's not so much that the languages themselves are fundamentally different but the literary canons/oral traditions that are created in a language that create the unique perspective. You could translate works but translation is inherently biased and lossy. Even after translating, media created in the current language is still heavily preferred. Think about how much more of Norse and Gaelic media that would've survived if your ancestors hadn't put it through highly lossy conversion when they changed languages. >What perspective is lost? Take for example Germania by Tacitus. IIRC it was written more as a critique (by way of comparison) of Roman society than an objective account of German society. If Germans today spoke a Romance language, no doubt they would read Germania in school and view their own ancestors and by extension themselves through some fun-house mirror. I'm not sure if contemporary accounts of that era from the Germans themselves exist, but imo even no record is better than one written from the perspective of a contemptuous outsider. >Astrophysics is the same in English, Gaelic, and in Blackfoot. For fundamentally objective things like astrophysics it is true that it would be the same in all languages. However, a language only used for poetry is not one that survives long. The more media (both technical and non-technical) that exists in a language the more likely you are to use it regardless of the domain. So imo creating useful media in astrophysics is what allows for the rest of their media to survive.