> A concept that's specific to the English language is probably a rather idiosyncratic disjunction of properties and not worth writing philosophy papers about.

> A concept that's specific to the English language is probably a rather idiosyncratic disjunction of properties and not worth writing philosophy papers about. Sure it does. To English speakers/linguists it could have a ton of reason to exist. In the same way a paper on wanderlust or schadenfreude would be useful to contextualize a realized phenomenon and how culture/language reflects that. This specific paper has no reason to exist because it is simply bad, however. > E.g. German has no proper translation for "creepy", we would use different words for various cases described by it. Do you think creepy is the universal word for an unnerving feeling in English? There's "menacing", "sinister", "eerie", "ominous", "macabre", "ghoulish", "distasteful", "repugnant", "offensive", "cloying", "odious", etc, etc, etc. All with different subtleties to their implications. The fact that German lacks a word for something has no effect on the lexicon of another language. > It's like thinking there is some global concept "can" that includes both "being able to" and "being allowed to", just because in the English language "can" can express both. Chances are, it's just an ambiguous word. The difference is cultural contextualization. English defers more to the agents in discussion to defer meaning. There are multiple words that all express a functionally equivalent meaning of "to be able": "can" (capability), "might" (desirability), "ought" (necessity), "may" (permissive), "able" (strictly neutral), etc; but each is used in a context that grants it more specified meaning.