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I think it's more about the relative ease or difficulty of expressing a concept in that language. If a concept is missing or unnatural, it's going to be harder
by pchristensen 15y ago
I think it's more about the relative ease or difficulty of expressing a concept in that language. If a concept is missing or unnatural, it's going to be harder to deal with that concept. Common examples of languages with more expressiveness than English are the multiple Russian words for blue, or the many Eskimo words for ice.
A thought experiment that I think works better is to imagine a language where people describe facial features extensively, to where a description in that language can easily be used to reconstruct an image of a person's face. Imagine how crippled a native speaker of that language would feel trying to speak in English, or the derision they would have towards the police sketch-artist process that took trained artists/interpreters quite a bit of time to extract a description from a witness that would sound like a 4 year old trying to describe a face. That's what linguistic differences are more like.