7 ms·

I'm not sure what's sad about it. What good is a language if no one speaks it? In the ideal world, wouldn't everyone speak the same language?

friendcrunch 5y ago
Language encodes within it's systems, a built-up treasure trove of human meaning. A universal language looses a humongous amount of meaning. Its usefulness is in merely communicating functionality. In short, such a "universal" will fragment for the need to enrich this substandard language. Remember, human language needs to be rich.
- thegrimmest 5y ago
  I'm not sure that any meaning is truly lost. Can you find a word in any language that isn't described by a short sentence in English? The differences seem mostly in the level of verbosity required to elucidate an idea.
  - bradrn 5y ago
    The problem is that it’s not just words. For instance, if you speak Tariana, every grammatical sentence must have a marker expressing how you know the sentence is true (‘evidentiality’). In Kalam, you only have ~100 verbs, all of which have extremely broad meanings, and any more complex verbal meaning must be created by composing together the verbs you have available. In White Hmong, every noun can occur with a ‘classifier’; its presence or absence specifies whether the noun has been newly introduced or not. And sure, I suppose you could lump all these together as ‘differences in verbosity’, but those differences matter: they mean that the most natural way to express something in Tariana, say, is going to be very different to the most natural way to express something in English, and a translation would lose some of the meaning of the Tariana sentence. (And a complete translation, losing no meaning whatsoever, would end up so verbose as to be almost useless.)
    - thegrimmest 5y ago
      Can you give a specific example of a word in Kalam or Tariana that cannot be expressed with a short sentence in English? It would follow that a short sentence in Kalam or Tariana may translate to a long sentence or short paragraph in English. I'm sure the same would be true the other way around. But doesn't this reinforce the idea that the difference is mainly in verbosity? And that the differences lie in which ideas can be expressed concisely and which must be expressed verbosely?
      - bradrn 5y ago
        > Can you give a specific example of a word in Kalam or Tariana that cannot be expressed with a short sentence in English? It would follow that a short sentence in Kalam or Tariana may translate to a long sentence or short paragraph in English. I’m not sure there are any examples which cannot be expressed with a short English sentence, but here’s one from Tariana: Masitetakakakadekaɾupidanapitaniki. ‘We did not make each other smoke again at all, so I leant from someone else.’ The problem with this translation is that it doesn’t completely get across the ‘feel’ of the original — e.g. the fact that this information was learnt from someone else is an integral part of the original sentence, whereas specifying this in English feels somewhat unnatural. > I'm sure the same would be true the other way around. Exactly. A Kalam example: Bin ak ñapanŋaŋ anup sop ak wki d ap tan d ap yap geb. ‘The woman is soaping her child.’ > And that the differences lie in which ideas can be expressed concisely and which must be expressed verbosely? This is not something I entirely disagree with. Generally speaking, anything which can be expressed in one language can be expressed in another. The differences go beyond verbosity though: it is often the case that such a complete translation sounds really unnatural. For instance, Kalam sentences make it easy to express motion, so you get a lot of sentences like: Bin pataj ogok am yg pak dad ap-elgp-al… woman young the go dig hit carrying come-PST.HAB-3PL… A literal translation would be ‘Young women used to go and dig and hit and carry and come back’, which doesn’t sound English-like at all. A more idiomatic translation might be something like, ‘Young women used to dig for rodents and kill them’, which focuses less on the sequence of events involved, but places more focus on the animals which were killed — something which is unusual in a Kalam sentence.
cdev_gl 5y ago
Just like in programming, different spoken languages have different capabilities-- certain ideas are easier to express in one language versus another. Some concepts don't even have words across languages. And there's beauty and rhythm, the way words rhyme, so even if you can express the same concepts, the network of how those concepts play off each other is different. Having shared languages is awesome, allowing people to communicate together. But having only one language would be a great tragedy. It'd be like saying all paintings can only use one color.
- thegrimmest 5y ago
  I don't think the painting analogy applies. You can add words and meanings to languages. If we all spoke the same language, we'd iterate on it until it could express all the ideas that we have. We may lose some rhyming along the way, but it seems a small price to pay for universal, clear communication.
  - tored 5y ago
    Eventually new languages would be created. Why? Because everyone wouldn't iterate at the speed or even the same direction.
    - thegrimmest 5y ago
      Right, but if we standardize the language, we can keep track of and de-duplicate all the iterations, much like we do with web standards.
jmcgough 5y ago
Yeah, it's sad that we're losing unique and interesting languages, but most people only learn 1-3 languages in their life. It's probably economically better for them to focus on ones that are spoken by larger groups of people.
- magicsmoke 5y ago
  It's weird that most of the discussion is focused on a false dichotomy between a single universal language for all humanity, and preserving every single language that exists today even if they only have a few dozen speakers. The reality is that most minority languages will die out, but we'll still have more languages with hundreds of thousands of speakers and backed by modern education systems than anyone could realistically learn in a lifetime.
vkou 5y ago
Languages do not map to eachother one to one. The works of Shakespeare, for instance, are untranslatable to another language, without some loss of meaning. Some are not phased by the loss of historic culture in that brave new world, but not everyone feels the same way.
- azangru 5y ago
  > Languages do not map to eachother one to one. The works of Shakespeare, for instance, are untranslatable to another language, without some loss of meaning. But isn't it exactly why in the ideal world everyone would speak the same language? Otherwise, due to the untranslatability, every Shakespeare is lost to the rest of the world that doesn't speak his language.
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    English somewhat often adopts foreign words when we don't have a word that means exactly the same thing. Ideas and experiences precede words and inform language, not the other way around.
  - vkou 5y ago
    It's not lost to the world, you just need to learn the still-living language it's written in. And on whatever lingua franca you choose to adopt, there will be an unbounded number of yet-to-be-written-works-of-shakespeare, that this language would lack the ability to express.
    - azangru 5y ago
      > It's not lost to the world, you just need to learn the still-living language it's written in. Just? Given how complex every language is, and the level of mastery that is required to read and appreciate the hypothetical Shakespeare of that language, and the time and effort that is required to achieve this level of mastery, this is highly impractical.
zepto 5y ago
> In the ideal world, wouldn't everyone speak the same language? Why exactly?
- thegrimmest 5y ago
  So we can all communicate as clearly as possible?
  - zepto 5y ago
    Why do you assume that a single language would enable that? It could just as easily have the opposite effect, of eliminating a wide range of expression and nuance, thus reducing the capacity for clear communication in absolute terms.
    - azangru 5y ago
      > It could just as easily have the opposite effect, of eliminating a wide range of expression and nuance Why would that happen? Expression and nuance is produced by the speakers of a language. Therefore, if different groups of speakers of a hypothetical common language had a need to express different nuances, they would evolve the language in such a way that it would become capable of expressing these nuances. Consider how dominant modern languages can serve hugely different social groups: scholars, petty criminals, soldiers, scientists, sports fans, social justice warriors, and so on, with each group having different ranges of nuances of expression.
      - tored 5y ago
        > they would evolve the language in such a way that it would become capable of expressing these nuances But everyone else that didn't evolve that couldn't understand it even though they speak the same language? Isn't how an evolution for a new language begins?
        azangru 5y ago
        > Isn't how an evolution for a new language begins? Consider evolution in biology. A species becomes distinct from another species when their individual members can no longer interbreed to produce fertile offspring. For an ancestor species to split into new ones, its populations have to be separated — either geographically (in the so-called allopatric speciation), or by the difference in reproductive timing (allochronic speciation). The point is, something needs to happen that breaks the free mixture of organisms between populations. It should be similar with languages — the societies that speak them get separated, and the language they speak evolves separately in different directions to become mutually incomprehensible. Which, with the current state of communication, is only likely to happen if humans become an interplanetary or an intergalactic species. On the same planet, we have plenty of opportunities to mix together and talk to each other, which, were there a hypothetical common language, should prevent it from splitting into multiple languages. Consider a major modern language. It will contain multiple jargons/slangs/argots that are barely comprehensible to each other (e.g. the medical jargon, or the physics jargon, or Cockney rhyming slang, and so on); and yet they contain a large mutually comprehensible common core that makes television, radio, shopping, conversations between strangers, and so on possible.
rogerclark 5y ago
It's only not sad if you live with a completely utilitarian life where art and the beauty of human creation have no value. Why don't we all just listen to one song, wear the same outfit and live in identical homes? Regardless of whether they're useful, unique and irreplaceable information will be lost when minority languages are gone, as this information exists only in the minds of the remaining speakers. It isn't possible to back up this kind of information like we do with the Internet Archive or something.
- thegrimmest 5y ago
  Don't you think everyone speaking the same language would promote flourishing in human creativity? Wouldn't being able to have a meaningful conversation with someone completely and totally different than yourself inspire you? Isn't that what made the internet a thing? It's really just a set of communication protocols that everyone agreed to speak.
  - zepto 5y ago
    I think if you take a look at the internet, you’ll discover that there are large numbers of people who speak the same language who can’t have meaningful conversations or inspire one another. Language isn’t the barrier here.
  - rogerclark 5y ago
    The sadness of losing a language is distinct from the question of whether it would be better if everyone spoke the same language.
  - MiddleEndian 5y ago
    >Don't you think everyone speaking the same language would promote flourishing in human creativity? Not necessarily. Sometimes creativity may flourish better if developed independently without common influences. >the internet Websites could be analogous to language in this case. Why use hacker news when you could use twitter or reddit? Independent subgroups can produce more interesting or unique discussion.
projectileboy 5y ago
I used to think the same thing, but empirically it seems that diverse ecosystems are healthier and more resilient to unexpected pressures, and this seems to be universally true.
- azangru 5y ago
  > diverse ecosystems are healthier and more resilient to unexpected pressures, and this seems to be universally true. This is quite true in evolutionary biology (from which you are even borrowing the term ecosystem), where the ever-changing environment puts different evolutionary pressures on a population of organisms, and the more genetically diverse a population is, the higher its chance to adapt to the pressure. I am not sure that this biological model holds true when applied to social systems. I find it hard to imagine that artificial barriers to information flow in human populations are particularly adaptive (unless, perhaps, an isolation from the frenzied social media due to a natural language barrier is considered adaptive).
Dove 5y ago
Languages are more than just encodings for meaning -- the language you think in gives you the basic units of meaning that you use to navigate the world. You can put 'untranslatable' into Google to look at lists of words to gain an intuitive understanding of what it is like to have access to another language. My quick search turned up this - https://www.boredpanda.com/untranslatable-words-found-in-translation-anjana-iyer https://www.boredpanda.com/untranslatable-words-found-in-tra... - which I think gives a good impression. Reading this list, you feel the impact of useful ideas, circles drawn around things you had never quite realized were things before, words you wish you had. You might think it's a problem you can remedy by borrowing words from other languages until you have all the concepts. But it's not that simple. Languages are a whole ecosystem -- words, idioms, culture, ways of seeing and being, grammars -- they come together into an inimitable whole. The whole system is like those words; if you cannot have it, you lose ways of seeing the world. Borrowing words still loses things -- it loses connections and connotations. Maybe I don't need the German "handschuh" (hand-shoe) because I have "glove", but I gain something by the perspective even if the literal meaning is the same. A favorite word of mine from ancient Greek is apo-kara-dokia -- it means eager, expectant watchfulness, that feeling the moment the lights go low and the movie is about to start, but sustained and persistent, like watching the tunnel at the airport waiting for someone you love to arrive, waiting and knowing they will. Like "handshoe", it has a literal breakdown -- "watching from the head" -- that captures those wide eyes and forward leaning alertness in the moment. English has "anticipation" or any number of shabby substitutes, but there's no competing with the Greek. You can't just add onto vocabulary endlessly in one language. English doesn't have 'handshoes' precisely because it does have 'gloves', and it doesn't have 'watching-from-the-head' precisely because it does have anticipation. Words die out if you don't use them, and you lose whole ways of seeing the world. Another thing you lose is when one word has two meanings, but they're really sort of related. For example, ancient Greek 'pharmacon' means "drugs" (like pharmacy), but it also means "sorcery", and I very much enjoy the connection that those are sort of subjectively similar things. The more expansive concept doesn't have an equivalent in English, and I'm the poorer for it -- but the richer for another language having taught me to see things that way. It's easy to explain with words. It's harder to explain with grammar. But you encounter the same phenomenon. Some languages have tenses and cases with more precise or less precise or just different meanings that the ones you grew up with -- and like the different words drawing bigger or smaller or just different circles around concepts, they give you another window into thinking about the world. But it all works together. The breaking-down-and-constructing aspect of German as a language is related to the way Germans are given to engineering, and the way German philosophers approach the world. If you encounter them in something other than their native language, you miss something of the whole. Translators will sometimes borrow words to try to fill the gap, but it's a poor substitute. Likewise, the logical precision and colorful concepts of ancient Greek inform the way its epic poets and ancient philosophers moved through the world -- and again, they are poorer in translation. Even idioms enrichen. The Chinese "Heaven is high and the emperor is far away" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_is_high_and_the_emperor_is_far_away https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_is_high_and_the_emperor... -- is so very Chinese in experience, and the fact that the Chinese saying itself is a pithy four words makes it work all the better in the context in which it is apropos. If we lost the Chinese language and its experience and culture, perhaps we could still say literally the same thing, but could not say quite exactly this, not with all its force of experience and history and character. And we would be poorer. Languages and cultures and philosophies and histories and environments all feed back on each other, and they are this phenomenon of creating ways of seeing things, happening over and over in many contexts, building into a cohesive whole. This is why they are valuable to study and valuable to preserve.

friendcrunch 5y ago

Language encodes within it's systems, a built-up treasure trove of human meaning. A universal language looses a humongous amount of meaning. Its usefulness is in merely communicating functionality. In short, such a "universal" will fragment for the need to enrich this substandard language. Remember, human language needs to be rich.

thegrimmest 5y ago
I'm not sure that any meaning is truly lost. Can you find a word in any language that isn't described by a short sentence in English? The differences seem mostly in the level of verbosity required to elucidate an idea.
- bradrn 5y ago
  The problem is that it’s not just words. For instance, if you speak Tariana, every grammatical sentence must have a marker expressing how you know the sentence is true (‘evidentiality’). In Kalam, you only have ~100 verbs, all of which have extremely broad meanings, and any more complex verbal meaning must be created by composing together the verbs you have available. In White Hmong, every noun can occur with a ‘classifier’; its presence or absence specifies whether the noun has been newly introduced or not. And sure, I suppose you could lump all these together as ‘differences in verbosity’, but those differences matter: they mean that the most natural way to express something in Tariana, say, is going to be very different to the most natural way to express something in English, and a translation would lose some of the meaning of the Tariana sentence. (And a complete translation, losing no meaning whatsoever, would end up so verbose as to be almost useless.)
  - thegrimmest 5y ago
    Can you give a specific example of a word in Kalam or Tariana that cannot be expressed with a short sentence in English? It would follow that a short sentence in Kalam or Tariana may translate to a long sentence or short paragraph in English. I'm sure the same would be true the other way around. But doesn't this reinforce the idea that the difference is mainly in verbosity? And that the differences lie in which ideas can be expressed concisely and which must be expressed verbosely?
    - bradrn 5y ago
      > Can you give a specific example of a word in Kalam or Tariana that cannot be expressed with a short sentence in English? It would follow that a short sentence in Kalam or Tariana may translate to a long sentence or short paragraph in English. I’m not sure there are any examples which cannot be expressed with a short English sentence, but here’s one from Tariana: Masitetakakakadekaɾupidanapitaniki. ‘We did not make each other smoke again at all, so I leant from someone else.’ The problem with this translation is that it doesn’t completely get across the ‘feel’ of the original — e.g. the fact that this information was learnt from someone else is an integral part of the original sentence, whereas specifying this in English feels somewhat unnatural. > I'm sure the same would be true the other way around. Exactly. A Kalam example: Bin ak ñapanŋaŋ anup sop ak wki d ap tan d ap yap geb. ‘The woman is soaping her child.’ > And that the differences lie in which ideas can be expressed concisely and which must be expressed verbosely? This is not something I entirely disagree with. Generally speaking, anything which can be expressed in one language can be expressed in another. The differences go beyond verbosity though: it is often the case that such a complete translation sounds really unnatural. For instance, Kalam sentences make it easy to express motion, so you get a lot of sentences like: Bin pataj ogok am yg pak dad ap-elgp-al… woman young the go dig hit carrying come-PST.HAB-3PL… A literal translation would be ‘Young women used to go and dig and hit and carry and come back’, which doesn’t sound English-like at all. A more idiomatic translation might be something like, ‘Young women used to dig for rodents and kill them’, which focuses less on the sequence of events involved, but places more focus on the animals which were killed — something which is unusual in a Kalam sentence.

cdev_gl 5y ago

Just like in programming, different spoken languages have different capabilities-- certain ideas are easier to express in one language versus another. Some concepts don't even have words across languages. And there's beauty and rhythm, the way words rhyme, so even if you can express the same concepts, the network of how those concepts play off each other is different. Having shared languages is awesome, allowing people to communicate together. But having only one language would be a great tragedy. It'd be like saying all paintings can only use one color.

thegrimmest 5y ago
I don't think the painting analogy applies. You can add words and meanings to languages. If we all spoke the same language, we'd iterate on it until it could express all the ideas that we have. We may lose some rhyming along the way, but it seems a small price to pay for universal, clear communication.
- tored 5y ago
  Eventually new languages would be created. Why? Because everyone wouldn't iterate at the speed or even the same direction.
  - thegrimmest 5y ago
    Right, but if we standardize the language, we can keep track of and de-duplicate all the iterations, much like we do with web standards.

jmcgough 5y ago

Yeah, it's sad that we're losing unique and interesting languages, but most people only learn 1-3 languages in their life. It's probably economically better for them to focus on ones that are spoken by larger groups of people.

magicsmoke 5y ago
It's weird that most of the discussion is focused on a false dichotomy between a single universal language for all humanity, and preserving every single language that exists today even if they only have a few dozen speakers. The reality is that most minority languages will die out, but we'll still have more languages with hundreds of thousands of speakers and backed by modern education systems than anyone could realistically learn in a lifetime.

vkou 5y ago

Languages do not map to eachother one to one. The works of Shakespeare, for instance, are untranslatable to another language, without some loss of meaning. Some are not phased by the loss of historic culture in that brave new world, but not everyone feels the same way.

azangru 5y ago
> Languages do not map to eachother one to one. The works of Shakespeare, for instance, are untranslatable to another language, without some loss of meaning. But isn't it exactly why in the ideal world everyone would speak the same language? Otherwise, due to the untranslatability, every Shakespeare is lost to the rest of the world that doesn't speak his language.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  English somewhat often adopts foreign words when we don't have a word that means exactly the same thing. Ideas and experiences precede words and inform language, not the other way around.
- vkou 5y ago
  It's not lost to the world, you just need to learn the still-living language it's written in. And on whatever lingua franca you choose to adopt, there will be an unbounded number of yet-to-be-written-works-of-shakespeare, that this language would lack the ability to express.
  - azangru 5y ago
    > It's not lost to the world, you just need to learn the still-living language it's written in. Just? Given how complex every language is, and the level of mastery that is required to read and appreciate the hypothetical Shakespeare of that language, and the time and effort that is required to achieve this level of mastery, this is highly impractical.

zepto 5y ago

> In the ideal world, wouldn't everyone speak the same language? Why exactly?

thegrimmest 5y ago
So we can all communicate as clearly as possible?
- zepto 5y ago
  Why do you assume that a single language would enable that? It could just as easily have the opposite effect, of eliminating a wide range of expression and nuance, thus reducing the capacity for clear communication in absolute terms.
  - azangru 5y ago
    > It could just as easily have the opposite effect, of eliminating a wide range of expression and nuance Why would that happen? Expression and nuance is produced by the speakers of a language. Therefore, if different groups of speakers of a hypothetical common language had a need to express different nuances, they would evolve the language in such a way that it would become capable of expressing these nuances. Consider how dominant modern languages can serve hugely different social groups: scholars, petty criminals, soldiers, scientists, sports fans, social justice warriors, and so on, with each group having different ranges of nuances of expression.
    - tored 5y ago
      > they would evolve the language in such a way that it would become capable of expressing these nuances But everyone else that didn't evolve that couldn't understand it even though they speak the same language? Isn't how an evolution for a new language begins?
      - azangru 5y ago
        > Isn't how an evolution for a new language begins? Consider evolution in biology. A species becomes distinct from another species when their individual members can no longer interbreed to produce fertile offspring. For an ancestor species to split into new ones, its populations have to be separated — either geographically (in the so-called allopatric speciation), or by the difference in reproductive timing (allochronic speciation). The point is, something needs to happen that breaks the free mixture of organisms between populations. It should be similar with languages — the societies that speak them get separated, and the language they speak evolves separately in different directions to become mutually incomprehensible. Which, with the current state of communication, is only likely to happen if humans become an interplanetary or an intergalactic species. On the same planet, we have plenty of opportunities to mix together and talk to each other, which, were there a hypothetical common language, should prevent it from splitting into multiple languages. Consider a major modern language. It will contain multiple jargons/slangs/argots that are barely comprehensible to each other (e.g. the medical jargon, or the physics jargon, or Cockney rhyming slang, and so on); and yet they contain a large mutually comprehensible common core that makes television, radio, shopping, conversations between strangers, and so on possible.

rogerclark 5y ago

It's only not sad if you live with a completely utilitarian life where art and the beauty of human creation have no value. Why don't we all just listen to one song, wear the same outfit and live in identical homes? Regardless of whether they're useful, unique and irreplaceable information will be lost when minority languages are gone, as this information exists only in the minds of the remaining speakers. It isn't possible to back up this kind of information like we do with the Internet Archive or something.

thegrimmest 5y ago
Don't you think everyone speaking the same language would promote flourishing in human creativity? Wouldn't being able to have a meaningful conversation with someone completely and totally different than yourself inspire you? Isn't that what made the internet a thing? It's really just a set of communication protocols that everyone agreed to speak.
- zepto 5y ago
  I think if you take a look at the internet, you’ll discover that there are large numbers of people who speak the same language who can’t have meaningful conversations or inspire one another. Language isn’t the barrier here.
- rogerclark 5y ago
  The sadness of losing a language is distinct from the question of whether it would be better if everyone spoke the same language.
- MiddleEndian 5y ago
  >Don't you think everyone speaking the same language would promote flourishing in human creativity? Not necessarily. Sometimes creativity may flourish better if developed independently without common influences. >the internet Websites could be analogous to language in this case. Why use hacker news when you could use twitter or reddit? Independent subgroups can produce more interesting or unique discussion.

projectileboy 5y ago

I used to think the same thing, but empirically it seems that diverse ecosystems are healthier and more resilient to unexpected pressures, and this seems to be universally true.

azangru 5y ago
> diverse ecosystems are healthier and more resilient to unexpected pressures, and this seems to be universally true. This is quite true in evolutionary biology (from which you are even borrowing the term ecosystem), where the ever-changing environment puts different evolutionary pressures on a population of organisms, and the more genetically diverse a population is, the higher its chance to adapt to the pressure. I am not sure that this biological model holds true when applied to social systems. I find it hard to imagine that artificial barriers to information flow in human populations are particularly adaptive (unless, perhaps, an isolation from the frenzied social media due to a natural language barrier is considered adaptive).

Dove 5y ago

Languages are more than just encodings for meaning -- the language you think in gives you the basic units of meaning that you use to navigate the world. You can put 'untranslatable' into Google to look at lists of words to gain an intuitive understanding of what it is like to have access to another language. My quick search turned up this - https://www.boredpanda.com/untranslatable-words-found-in-translation-anjana-iyer https://www.boredpanda.com/untranslatable-words-found-in-tra... - which I think gives a good impression. Reading this list, you feel the impact of useful ideas, circles drawn around things you had never quite realized were things before, words you wish you had. You might think it's a problem you can remedy by borrowing words from other languages until you have all the concepts. But it's not that simple. Languages are a whole ecosystem -- words, idioms, culture, ways of seeing and being, grammars -- they come together into an inimitable whole. The whole system is like those words; if you cannot have it, you lose ways of seeing the world. Borrowing words still loses things -- it loses connections and connotations. Maybe I don't need the German "handschuh" (hand-shoe) because I have "glove", but I gain something by the perspective even if the literal meaning is the same. A favorite word of mine from ancient Greek is apo-kara-dokia -- it means eager, expectant watchfulness, that feeling the moment the lights go low and the movie is about to start, but sustained and persistent, like watching the tunnel at the airport waiting for someone you love to arrive, waiting and knowing they will. Like "handshoe", it has a literal breakdown -- "watching from the head" -- that captures those wide eyes and forward leaning alertness in the moment. English has "anticipation" or any number of shabby substitutes, but there's no competing with the Greek. You can't just add onto vocabulary endlessly in one language. English doesn't have 'handshoes' precisely because it does have 'gloves', and it doesn't have 'watching-from-the-head' precisely because it does have anticipation. Words die out if you don't use them, and you lose whole ways of seeing the world. Another thing you lose is when one word has two meanings, but they're really sort of related. For example, ancient Greek 'pharmacon' means "drugs" (like pharmacy), but it also means "sorcery", and I very much enjoy the connection that those are sort of subjectively similar things. The more expansive concept doesn't have an equivalent in English, and I'm the poorer for it -- but the richer for another language having taught me to see things that way. It's easy to explain with words. It's harder to explain with grammar. But you encounter the same phenomenon. Some languages have tenses and cases with more precise or less precise or just different meanings that the ones you grew up with -- and like the different words drawing bigger or smaller or just different circles around concepts, they give you another window into thinking about the world. But it all works together. The breaking-down-and-constructing aspect of German as a language is related to the way Germans are given to engineering, and the way German philosophers approach the world. If you encounter them in something other than their native language, you miss something of the whole. Translators will sometimes borrow words to try to fill the gap, but it's a poor substitute. Likewise, the logical precision and colorful concepts of ancient Greek inform the way its epic poets and ancient philosophers moved through the world -- and again, they are poorer in translation. Even idioms enrichen. The Chinese "Heaven is high and the emperor is far away" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_is_high_and_the_emperor_is_far_away https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_is_high_and_the_emperor... -- is so very Chinese in experience, and the fact that the Chinese saying itself is a pithy four words makes it work all the better in the context in which it is apropos. If we lost the Chinese language and its experience and culture, perhaps we could still say literally the same thing, but could not say quite exactly this, not with all its force of experience and history and character. And we would be poorer. Languages and cultures and philosophies and histories and environments all feed back on each other, and they are this phenomenon of creating ways of seeing things, happening over and over in many contexts, building into a cohesive whole. This is why they are valuable to study and valuable to preserve.