[goodjam]

German is very suitable for abstract thinking because you can form compound words with ease and put the function at the end of the sentence. These compound words are hard to translate (aufhebung - sublation is a famous example). Hegel wrote about this in his Logic. German is like a different programming paradigm compared to English.

[mannykannot]

That is a very Whorfian view, but McWhorter, among others, would question whether it is at all plausible that these differences in what is little more than syntax can really make a profound difference in meaning. To put it another way, if these language features do make that much of a difference, then is there much more to these texts than a self-referential discussion of the meaning of the language used in these texts?

Your programming-paradigm analogy is perhaps unintentionally apt, as underneath their particular representations, they are all Turing-equivalent.

[VLM]

Program languages can be Turing equivalent however an alternative view of language is its like any other data encoding and via some kinds of Shannon's Law for human speech your language has to be able to achieve a certain SNR equivalent minimum to get an idea across in a small slice of a lifetime devoted to a book at a reasonably low enough error rate to claim a meeting of the minds on a topic. So you can write Kant in German and maybe its possible to understand an English translation of Kant with a bit more effort but there exists a hard lower SNR limit below which it doesnt work such that a Lojban translation of Kant is simply a fliba. Note that its difficult to find a Lojban-English dictionary that isn't also an English thesaurus in practice. There are indications Kant could be translated into Esperanto but nobodies tried in public, or maybe because its also quite impossible.

Now as a counter example (or is it?) see the whole concept of "a quran isn't a quran unless its written in arabic at which point its a real quran" vs the similar fun the pre-reformation christians had with the same belief WRT the new testament.

[mannykannot]

That is a very interesting point, but I wonder if Lojban's avoidance of ambiguity is the root of the translation difficulty - I doubt that Kant is unambiguous.

I think the quran and new testament issues arise from theology, not linguistics.

[osullivj]

Stack based, and concatenative, like Forth.