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by Falkvinge 744 days ago
It's like how the Inuit have 35 words for "snow", or the Swedish have 51 words for "tax evasion". Some cultures have a need for nuances that necessarily gets reflected into the local language, nuances which will be lost when bluntly translating into the one category-level word in English.
1 comments

The Inuit example is a common misconstrual [0]. The ancestor language has three root words that they might modify with a suffix in the way we might use a phrase 'snow on the ground'.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow