[pjmlp]

Although English is seen as the lingua franca of the 21st century, it wasn't always like that.

In the several millions we are able to speak and write, there have been lots of languages taking that role.

And even English is not as common as many people think, just traveling around the world will teach people that there are many places where knowing English will be of no help.

Besides languages represent culture, not all concepts are expressible across all languages and they are also a door to our past as mankind, sure they are worth preserving.

[adamnemecek]

> Although English is seen as the lingua franca of the 21st century, it wasn't always like that.

I'm aware of that.

> And even English is not as common as many people think, just traveling around the world will teach people that there are many places where knowing English will be of no help.

I guess it's not just about sheer numbers but also about what sort of stuff is produced in the language. E.g. the expert books are mostly written in English. You don't even have to go that far, e.g. there aren't all that many say compiler books that were not translated from English, that are up to date and not terrible. This is for me more important than being able to have a discussion with Bhutani farmer.

> Besides languages represent culture, not all concepts are expressible across all languages and they are also a door to our past as mankind, sure they are worth preserving.

Well it's a tradeoff. And I think that at some point the cost of preserving them outweighs the benefits.

[pjmlp]

> the expert books are mostly written in English.

This depends very much on the domain.

[Rapzid]

Just out of curiosity, what concept is not expressible in English?

[pjmlp]

There are lots of examples. Citing just two out of my mind.

Feierabend (German) - expresses the concept you are finished with the work duties for the day and can enjoy your private time with family and friends

Saudade (Portuguese) - a mixture of loneliness, melancholy, sense of loosing part of you feelings, even mixed with a kid of sad joy, while remembering something that is no longer there.

[viraptor]

You did a pretty good job expressing those concepts in English in your post. Sure, there's no single word for each of those expressions, but that only means they're not that popular in everyday usage.

If they were popular enough, we'd say: English does have words for those ideas! They're "feierabend" and "saudade".

Exactly the same as "gesundheit".

[pjmlp]

Thanks for the compliment, however I feel from the linguistic point of view, I explained them.

Expressing means there is a similar word.

[alieteraz]

The Turkish "huzun" is a lot like saudade.

You should compare Orhan Pamuk's treatment with Fernando Pessoa.

[pjmlp]

Thanks for the hint. Although I imagine reading a translated version won't be quite the same thing.

[DCKing]

You just expressed these in English.

Although you might spend far more words on it, and it might be hard to properly capture abstract concepts in another language, these are not examples of concepts that cannot be expressed in English.

[pjmlp]

> You just expressed these in English.

From linguistic point of view, I explained them.

Expressing means there is an English word with the same meaning.

[DCKing]

What definition of "to express" are you using? Because expressing does not come with a single word restriction that I know of. I think you mean whether or not there is a translation of a certain word?

We were talking about concepts being "expressable" in any language. Of course many words are not directly translatable (half of Chinese isn't, that isn't news to anybody), so that's not particularly interesting. But you'd be hard pressed to find a concept that is not at least explainable in English.

[pramalin]

Tamil and probably many other Indian languages have various examples: Love as in parental (anbu), as between couples (kaadhal). "How many -eth" (ethanaiyaavathu) child are you to your parents? Many forms of family relationships: younger brother (thambi), elder brother (annan), etc.

[jey]

Those concepts seem to be expressed just fine. The only difference is that you used multiple words instead of a single word. (I'm a native Tamil speaker.)

[sampo]

> Just out of curiosity, what concept is not expressible in English?

My native language doesn't force feed gendered personal pronouns on me, so when other languages (English, Swedish, German etc.) do , I feel they are forcing me to be sexist.

(The Swedes are actually trying to take some steps fixing this aspect of their language, by introducing a gender-neutral pronoun.)

Even worse (i.d. feels even more unnatural) are the languages with gendered nouns (German, Spanish etc.).

[hisham_hm]

Interesting — my native language is Portuguese and it suffers from having gendered nouns. Writing in English to me is an improvement in that sense. I didn't know there are other languages which are even better in that respect. What is your native language?

[sampo]

Finnish. But there are others, like Armenian, Basque, Bengali, Chinese, Estonian, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Persian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderless...