[CWuestefeld]

Funnily, "let" and "make" are the same word in Chinese.

In Mandarin, the words for "buy" and "sell" are the same phoneme with different intonation. To my untrained ear, they both sound like "my" -- but they mean opposites.

[mc32]

Chinese and English are remarkable in how they address ideas. In Chinese, for the most part, there are only basic words -with little available in the way of synonyms for supplying nuance.'

So you ask someone how do you say big. How do you say gigantic, how do you say long, how do you say capacious, etc. It's all "da" ”大“。

So when people come to me in English and say something like you know, capricious is not exactly the same as whimsical, I can say, that's only because you think it can't be. But it can be. It only is because we've integrated words from French, Latin, Scandinavian, etc. which give us the breadth of choice. But it's kind of artificial anyway and if you force yourself to think about basic meanings -there is little difference. (Law excluded).