[egwor]

I think that by exploring how different cultures and languages communicate about things opens the mind. There are concepts that can't be easily/succinctly explained in English but can in other languages. I think that we should be encouraging such breadth of thought because it allows us to appreciate new aspects of the world we live in.

[card_zero]

Nobody's ever been able to explain to me what those concepts are, so I don't believe it.

[dabber]

Family relationships are the first thing that come to my mind.

In Spanish for example, consuegro and consuegra refer to the father and mother of your child's spouse.

The Spanish words succinctly encode that relationship while English requires verbally traversing the family tree.

[amiga386]

That's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinship_terminology and yes, you can categorise languages by the extent of their kinship terminology.

You could postulate that a language developed specific words for family and relatives because they prized those specific family structures? Or that language copied another language that did.

Similarly, you can categorise languages by how they group numbers, e.g. French is vigesimal while English is decimal.

[AnimalMuppet]

OK, here's one: My wife grew up in Latin America. Sometimes, instead of saying "I knocked it over", they say what literally translates to "it fell itself to me". Same idea - it fell - but hey, not my fault, it just happened.

Here's another: "fíjese". It kind of means "you'd never guess what happened". It's like "something that was completely unpredictable and totally outside my control happened, and it negatively affected my ability to do what I was trying to do", except with a lot fewer syllables.

Here's one going the other way: I was talking to a systems engineer about a specific issue, and I said that "we might be able to sweep that under someone else's rug". He was from Russia, and didn't have "sweeping it under the rug" as an idiom, and so didn't know what sweeping it under someone else's rug might mean.

Now, none of these are things that you can't say in another language or culture. You can. They're just a lot more unwieldy to say, and so people express that idea a lot less frequently.

[magarnicle]

All the other replies to this missed the joke.

[john_strinlai]

its the subject of dozens of listacles.

waldeinsamkeit, saudade, ya’aburnee, etc.

[dofm]

Hiraeth

[drcongo]

That one only works when the homeland is that beautiful.

[dofm]

I don't know. I mean it's not a longing for just a place, as I understand it. I am not even sure that hiraeth is necessarily longing for the beauty of a place or time. Hiraeth, it seems to me, could equally be a longing for the wordless Welsh expressions of emotion, or for rainy days, or damp, or a time that has passed, depending on where the bearer of the emotion is currently feeling it.

(I am not Welsh, but it has been described to me as an ever tightening elastic emotional rope that is anchored in a place and time that it might not be possible to go back to)

[drcongo]

That's an excellent description I think.

[Theodores]

This was my starting point, a belief that other languages were 'better' at expressing different things. However, I have done a few projects requiring translation over the years and I have found European language speakers, notably Italian and German, preferring the freedom of English to the relative straightjackets of their respective mother tongues.

As a Brit I am biased, however, there is a crucial difference between 'free range' British English and 'simplified' American English. Superficially, American English seems the more 'free', with liberties taken to create cool words and brand names. However, American English is constrained by the work of Webster, with there being a definitive dictionary, very much cast in stone, with changes such as 'no u in colour' made purely because of a rejection of everything English, including tea and spellings.

Currently we have something more extreme going on with the language that Ukrainians are expected to speak, with their 'government' seeking new and improved ways to move the language away from Russian. If this was OG English then it would be like getting rid of every French sounding word, so 'beef' becomes 'cow meat', 'mutton' becomes 'sheep meat' and so on. These changes can be made quite easily since it is not a whole new language has to be learned (or unlearned) at once. The lists of banned/allowed words changes all the time, much like Newspeak in 1984.

This won't be the last attempt to determine what a language is by decree, however, the result of such efforts is that languages get stuck in time. Hence the observations of my translation 'helpers', preferring English to their mother tongues.

IMHO American English is British English, stuck in time for 250 years, or whenever Webster got his special dictionary to schools. Meanwhile, OG British English has evolved in its own way, a form of direct democracy, where words change based on how they are used in the here and now.

I don't believe there is such a thing as an actual English word, all of it is 'stolen' from various colonial adventures of the past, or inherited from invaders of the past, notably the 'old enemy', as in the French.

French used to be the language for arts, diplomacy and the aristocracy. But they lost out, in part due to the fixed dictionary. Had they allowed their language to accept English loan words, chances are that French could still be the language it once was.

Currently there is an existential threat to English as the language for science and technology due to the rise of China. It gets worrying when data sheets for Texas Instruments components are released first in Chinese, to be followed up, months later with English translations. Therefore I am rooting for en-GB rather than en-US, due to that minor detail of there not being a 'Webster' dictionary of the past, casting a shadow on our future.

[bluebarbet]

IMO this take really overstates the importance of prescriptive efforts to control the evolution of languages. In particular, the relative decline of French is easily explained by geopolitics. Outside officialdom the Académie is mostly ignored. French today is as packed with English loanwords as every other European language.

[suddenlybananas]

>Had they allowed their language to accept English loan words, chances are that French could still be the language it once was.

The Académie française has exactly 0 to do with the fact that French is used less as a lingua franca.

[throwaway2037]

    > the fact that French is used less as a lingua franca

I think you are over-interpreting this point. Japanese has far fewer speakers globally compared to French. And yes, Japanese imports a huge number of foreign words -- akin to modern English. Ironically, mainland China practically has an alergic reaction to loanwords and creates natives terms for everything. Even weirder, Taiwan and Korea are somewhere in between. None of these places speak anything close to a "lingua franca" and have wildly different language cultures around loanwords.