> I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English.

That's an extraordinary statement; how many languages do you speak? In my home we speak a melange of three, different ratios depending on who is speaking to whom. And mixed in are other words that my wife or I acquired from other languages used when younger. Some concepts are just simpler or more intense in one language than another. Even though I have been speaking English from birth, use it every day, and live in an English speaking country, there are some things that are simply not natural in it. It would be like trying to write Lisp code using C -- possible (there are lisp compilers that emit C), but painful.

Do you know of one? I have been looking for one for years and nobody has been able to provide me one. Sure some terms can’t be easily translated into English (especially those that rely on assumed cultural knowledge), but none that I have found can’t be expressed in English.

Your Lisp - C analogy is not a bad one (I would have used assembler as the base rather than C). Sure there are some languages that are able to solve some problem more efficiently or elegantly than assembler, but there is no program that can’t (in principle) be written in assembler. There are however many programs that can be written in assembler that can’t be written in Lisp.

To continue my provocative thesis then you can think of English as the assembler of human thought :)

I believe "expressed" is closer to "there's a concept everybody is familiar with and there's a specific feeling associated with that one word/expression that everyone understands without providing the definition of the word".

Kind of like schadenfreude is now known to English speakers as schadenfreude. You can explain what it means, but there's no direct equivalent that's as easy to bring up.

From my own experience, I found that there's no direct equivalent to "disturbing" in Polish. There are many similar words (equivalents of "shocking" and other), but they just don't have the same feeling associated with them.

Schadenfreude as a concept existed in English long before the word appeared in English and I am sure Polish speakers feel disturbed at times even if they don't have a precise word for it. Human emotions and feelings are universal hence why they can all be expressed in all languages.

The concepts that can't be expressed in all languages are those that are abstract and technical. A nice simple example of this is in some Australian Aboriginal languages there are no words for numbers of objects higher than 3 (they just become many). It really is impossible to translate the number 14 into these languages as the corresponding concept just doesn't exist.

> Do you know of one?

Of course, I use them all the time. I'll give you a couple of silly, yet profound examples. In German and Marathi there are different words for the droppings (crap) of different animals. In fact in German there's a book that teaches the kids different words. Unlike the highly developed squeamishness of the English language around body functions, you might use one of these words to describe something non-scatalogical (say, some dropped bolts under a piece of machinery) Köttel which includes in one word that they are small, scattered, left by some small creature (i.e. by someone careless or simpleminded -- probably insulting yourself or someone else you're talking about) -- something that can be explained in English but by the time you've done so it's not worth it.

Or an example from English: because of the French invasion, English has different words for animals in the field (e.g. swine and pig) and on the table (pork). At home we'll use cow, Kuh, and vache (always humorously) as well as beef or "hamburger" in an English sentence just to emphasize different ways in which the animal is used in different cultures.

Agricultural roots are still current German and Marathi in a way not true in English, again due to the Norman invasion.

(oh yeah, another great German example is the different words for snot depending on its consistency).

German has a rich ontology of earth moving apparatus, and each kind of machine (e.g. Löffelbaggnr) has a descriptive term that even kids know and can understand. If that exists in English I have not seen it (and I've spent some time in construction) except presumably to particular specialists.

At the opposite end, in French you can't say shallow (only peu profond -- "a small depth") which has so much semantic richness it makes the term "shallow" shallow. In general, wordplay in English is pretty thin gruel compared to what you can get away with in French, or even German. Speaking of that the very structure of Arabic lets you say things with a richness (kitab vs katib) that is I find (and I have been speaking English in English speaking countries for more than 40 years) inexpressible in English.

> To continue my provocative thesis then you can think of English as the assembler of human thought

I enjoy speaking English but this statement is hardly true.

All of these are examples of my claim which is that all concepts in other languages can be expressed in English. Sure you might have a specfic term for the droppings of cows in some language (we have the same thing in English not that it matters), but this concept can be translated into English. It might not be as poetic, or it might not have quite the same emotional association, but it is translatable.

The concepts that can't be translated are all highly technical concepts from the cutting edge of science and technology. These often lack the vocabulary in other languages to enable them to be expressed in that language because the limited number of people that understand them only communicate to each other about them in English. There are a very large number of these scientific concepts hence there are a large number of concepts that can only be expressed in English.

I don't get it; can't you just describe the technical things in the other languages?

Brainf* may be turing complete, but I would certainly prefer to use a more ordinary language.

Yes you can, but at the cutting edge of science this is a big job because of the amount of assumed knowledge and concepts you need to explain the new concept. To translate the new concept you need translate all supporting concepts as well to enable the person to understand the new concept.

In practice this requires translating a significant amount of all scientific knowledge from English into the target language (lets pick Swahili for example). Because this is such a huge job with little return, scientists just all work in one common language and for historical reasons this is English.

Of course further away from the cutting edge the easier it is to explain concepts in a non-English language which is why science can be taught to undergraduates in a language other than English. Once you are dealing with the primary literature this becomes very difficult.

I'm not saying that a language can't be more convenient for some things than some other language is for those things. See Brainf* vs python.

It seems strange to me to put English on all that much of a pedestal though. I mean, aren't many of the cutting-edge words recently neologisms anyway? (possibly named after someone)

Like, "anti-deSitter space", deSitter is iirc a guy's name, and anti could be translated or left alone if it is recognized in the language in question, and the word space could be translated, so I don't see what the problem would be there.

I mean I don't really know any cutting edge science because, uh, I'm not a scientist. But, from wikipedia, I'm trying to see if I can remember anything that seems like it would be particularly hard to translate and nothing comes to mind quickly? I suppose I could look at wikipedia articles on new topics in other languages and see what ones are missing or have many english words in them?

I am not putting English on a pedestal, just trying to explain why so much of human thought is only able to be communicated in English.

Any scientific concept can be translated into any language in principle, it is just that in practice nobody does - well at least until the concepts filter down to the undergraduate level.

You will really find it impossible to be a professional scientist if you can’t read and write English these days (speaking is less important). In the past if you could not read and write Latin you couldn’t discuss the latest scientific concepts, now that role is played by English. A very large percentage of all concepts are now scientific concepts and hence accessible only to English speakers (well readers).

Sure, you can express pretty much any concept from a foreign language in English, and vice-versa if the language is thorough enough. What you lose is the power and conciseness that comes from having a single word expressing a concept that would take 10 or 18 words to be correctly expressd in English. I have memorized a few interesting ones in some languages: 'Litost' (czech), 'Prozvonit' (czech also),'Tartle'(scottish), 'Mamihlapinatapei' (an idiom from Tierra del Fuego), 'Ya’aburnee' (arabic), and my own language's 'saudade', which to some is just translated as 'longing for something you have lost', but is, for native speakers, of course, something else.

English is very interesting in that if a word makes sense to use (rather than a phrase) then English will borrow that word without hesitation.

Actually because the language of science and technology is English there are lots of concepts that can’t be expressed in any other language. Sure any emotion a human can feel can be expressed in any language, but most higher level scientific concepts can’t be expressed in any language other than English. Out of the total number of human concepts that have ever been communicated, the majority are only available to English speakers.

    most higher level scientific concepts can’t be expressed
    in any language other than English. Out of the total
    number of human concepts that have ever been communicated,
    the majority are only available to English speakers.

Please provide examples to support your baseless claim.

Pick any scientific paper at random. No other language other than English has the terms and concepts required to write the paper - you can’t translate most scientific papers into another language since the complete set of terms and concepts don’t exist in any other languages.

It is not that you can’t write scientific papers in other languages (many are written in other languages), just that we have settled on English as the language of science. The vast majority of new scientific papers are written in English and hence every new concept within them can’t be expressed in any other language since there are no corresponding vocabulary to map the new concept onto. You can of course make up a new term in an another language if you want, but in this is not done for the many new concepts since it is more productive to just work within English.

Of course there are some papers that are written in a foreign language and which contain new concepts. These papers can’t be translated into English without inventing new terms in English. The whole untranslatability issue is purely a numbers game where the papers in English only vastly outnumber those in any other language and hence most of the novel concepts are in English alone.

Well, paraphrasing your post...

Pick any scientific paper related with biodiversity at random. No other language other than latin (or maybe greek) has the terms and concepts required to write it - you can’t translate Oegopsida or Metasequoia glyptostroboides (Taxodiaceae: Conipherophytina) into english, or another language since the complete set of terms and concepts don’t exist in any other languages.

It is not that you can’t write scientific papers in other languages (lots of basic concepts in chemistry or physics developped between 17th and 19th centuries were written and expressed in french and deutsch without any effort), in fact you must use other languages. Consider writing the main parts of your work using math language. There is not much scientific articles or technical ideas developped exclusively in pure english.

You can't write a modern scientific paper in classical Greek or Latin these days as the vocabulary just doesn't exist in these languages. Sure scientific papers borrow terms from other languages, but today you can really only write most papers in English - the required terminology and concepts are missing from most languages. There really is a world of ideas only accessible in English.

As you rightly point out there is nothing about English that makes it suited for science inherently - it is just an accident of history. This does not change the fact that today the language of science is English and hence many scientific ideas are expressed exclusively in English.

    You can't write a modern scientific paper in classical
    Greek or Latin

You're comparing modern day English with languages that have died more than 1500 years ago. Your arguments are incoherent and suggest a serious lack of judgment.

I think it would be more productive to read what I have actually written rather than personally attack me.

I have read what you wrote - that is what upset me. You come up with ridiculous, blatantly false, unfounded claims and don't back them up. I understand it might be annoying to be called out like this, but letting this ignorance pass without calling it out is akin to agreeing with it. I still think you're wrong. But I'm not on a witch hunt, if this is what concerns you.

I can't imagine why you would get upset about something so abstract. Let's have a civilised discussion about if highly technical concepts can be translated into languages other than English, not make personal attacks.

I am upset in the intellectual sense, not the physical.

There is no discussion to be had. You are wrong. If you cannot accept the basic fact that any concept can be translated into any language (efficiency notwithstanding) then fine, just don't pretend you want to engage in "civilised discussion".

Confrontation is not a personal attack. The arguments you gave (and still support) are evidence of someone who is either trolling or has not seen the world. Honest question: do you speak/read multiple languages?

Yes I can read (and speak badly) a few languages (Spanish, French and a bit of Italian) and I have travelled widely - not that it is really relevant.

I think you can’t accept that there are many concepts that can’t be expressed in any language other than English. I am a scientist by background, trained in multiple fields for over 20 years, and yet I only have an understanding of a tiny fraction of all the scientific concepts out there (I can’t say how low, but well under 0.01%).

The vast majority of concepts (distinct ideas) that I personally know are scientific. With almost all the scientific concepts I know it is not possible to communicate to someone about the concept in any language other than English because the background concepts are missing from other languages. This is not because English is inherently superior to any other language, just a consequence of English being the common language of science.

You see this when you go to a scientific conference - people who speak a common language other than English will chit-chat to each other in their own language, but when you hear them talking to each other about science it either totally in English, or a hybrid where ever second word is English - there is often so much English in these conversations that I can follow along even when I have no understanding of the base language.

    I think you can’t accept that there are many concepts that
    can’t be expressed in any language other than English.

I cannot accept such an absurdity, because it is false. I am also a scientist trained in theoretical physics and I have received my education in French, a colleague had his in Portuguese, another in Mandarin, yet another in French/Arabic and our professors and PIs had theirs in German, English, French, Spanish and Romanian (that I know of, could be more).

You are right that at conferences people speak English, and we speak English in group meetings for the simple reason that it's the common denominator. There is no other reason. We have scientific discussions in French and English, some have them in German or Arabic, it doesn't matter because they're all equally capable of describing scientific thought.

I think the point you're trying to make is that the scientific vocabulary in some languages, in some scientific fields, sometimes doesn't keep up with that of English. This I would concede to you. But usually, just like English does, the other languages simply borrow the new words (or craft the usually obvious equivalents using greek/latin or whatever). This has nothing to do with a language's inherent capacity of describing concepts, as you maintain. This argument is a much weaker form than that which you propose.

I think you are finally understanding what I am saying. Of course it is possible to translate all scientific concepts into any human language, just that in practice it is not done since the return is minimal and the cost high. Rather than waste an enormous amount of resources on translating every paper, conference proceeding, report and patent into the thousands of different human languages we have settled on just using English.

Any concept (and all the required prerequisite concepts) that have not been translated to the new language can’t be communicated in that language. Nothing more.

The only interesting aspect of all this is that it makes a large chunk of human thought only able to be communicated effectively in one language. It would probably would have been ideal to have settled on a synthetic language designed specifically for science communication (mathematics is part of the way there), but history didn’t turn out that way.

Gah.... instead of shaking my head in disbelief/disagreement/disappointment/stupefaction once again, I will simply wish you the best of luck in your endeavours and bail out from this impass.

You are aware of the fact, that Einstein's papers are in German, right?

> The vast majority of new scientific papers are written in English and hence every new concept within them can’t be expressed in any other language since there are no corresponding vocabulary to map the new concept onto.

Non sequitur. But how about _you_ provide an example of a non-translatable concept in an English paper. Should not be hard: 'Just pick any scientific paper at random.'

What you're saying makes absolutely no sense. Do you even speak another language than English? Millions of people each year have their graduate education on languages other than English and are doing fine. They do learn English for broad communication, but what you're implying is that they couldn't even think in their own language since it's inadequate.

I'm sorry to say but you're full of it if you believe what you wrote. It's an absurdity only someone who has never travelled or been exposed to the world could say.

I am implying or saying none of this. I think you need to read carefully what I have written, not what you have projected on to me.

At one point, German was the language of science, however.

Yes it was in some fields and still is to a certain extent in organic chemistry. The only language today other than English where a reasonable amount of new scientific knowledge is published is Chinese, but even in China there is a strong desire to publish in English if you are a scientist.

> Out of the total number of human concepts that have ever been communicated, the majority are only available to English speakers.

Wait, I'm not sure if I agree with the rest of your post, but this last sentence is surely an exaggeration, no? You mean over 50% of human concepts that were ever communicated are only available to english speakers?

Yes because so much of novel human knowledge is tied to science and technology. Sure there are millions of novels, movies, poems, etc in thousands of different languages, but the range of ideas contained within them is rather limited.

You know that English only became a lingua franca in the 20th century? Before that, hardly anything of scientific significance was expressed or published in English? The seminal works in physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology were written in German, Latin, etc

Yes of course. But since 1945 the vast majority of papers have been written in English. I think people forget how much science has grown over the last 75 years to the point where everything written pre-1945 is a small minority of the scientific literature.

Do you think that the ideas of Leibniz and Cauchy, that is differential and integral calculus, of Heisenberg and Einstein, that is Quantum mechanics and Relativity, of Curie, Mendelejew, Hahn, Bosch, ... basically, of any non-english speaking scientist with breakthrough insights, are not understood by English speaking scientists, when translated?

What makes you believe people think about concepts "In English", when they are published in English? Certainly Feynman was thinking about QM in English, even though most of the concepts were developed in Norwegian and German.

Also, I'm still waiting for a single example of an english named scientific concept, that is not understandable to a German/French expert in the field. Maybe you have at least _one_ example handy, claiming that "most scientific concepts" are of this type.

None of the scientists you listed are alive let alone at the cutting edge of science and their work proceeds the move of science to English. Interestingly all their papers when they were published were not able to be translated in English without creating new terms which made it hard for English physicists who did not speak German.

Of course German or French scientists can understand modern scientific papers because they all speak English. I have met thousands of scientists who's first language is not English and not a single one can't read English.

As for an example I literally picked the first papers I found on NCBI. Written by a Chinese team in English - good luck translating this paper into any other language [1].

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27372578

Some people act so self-entitled, it hurts. Just because you seem to neither have appreciation for beauty nor humanities, doesn't free you from acknowledging it in others.

Your premise seems to be that all languages are 'Turing-equivalent': Given enough time+patience you can "explain" the meaning of every expression in every other language. To be honest, a book that wastes my time "explaining" concepts from the language it was originally written in is not a book I would consider fun.

I hope you can agree, that describing a feeling is not the same as actually feeling it. But you don't accept that there are words that evoke a feeling in a native speaker, that are not evoked by reading a translation in another language?

There are already several examples of phrases in this thread that can only clumsily be explained in English, and some of them are for exactly this reason already used by English speakers. The amount of scientific publications on indivual pieces of literature should also tell you that language as art is more than describing things.

Btw, your example of scientific papers is entirely besides the point because their purpose precisely is to just describe something, instead of evoking feelings or images in the readers mind, tapping into his stream of associations/values/lifelong cultural traditions etc. You also claim that _all_ human thoughts in history are "rather limited" when compared to modern "scientific papers". This is trolling, I hope.

Finally, the fact that you make out your own language as the lingua franka of all humanity does not do much good to your argument, which has a priori nothing to do with a specific language. Rather, it makes you look stereotypical Western-centric.

Please stop assuming who I am and what I think and most especially claiming I said things I have not said.

> I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English.

Well, no shit? The only language you speak is English. Any concepts that are foreign or difficult to explain in English would probably be out of your realm of understanding.

You don't know what languages I speak (other than English of course), but this is irrelevant. It is not if I can find a concept that can not be expressed in English, but if anyone I speak to can come up with one. Do you know of any?

To translate scientific literature is the easiest part of translation. In fact, a lot of papers don't even get translated because everyone can read them after learning 100-200 words from the respective language. I can tell you that most of my time goes by reading scientific papers in languages that are not my mother tongue.

The question discussed in this thread is _not_: Would it be beneficial to have all scientific papers in one language? It is: Would it be beneficial to have all literature, discussions, jokes, poems and songs in one language. A question, that Newton's work and the amount of NSF funded papers in 2015 has absolutely no relation to.

Do you really think you can understand the concepts in a scientific paper knowing just 200 words of the language they are written in?

In my field of expertise, which is mathematics, this is certainly possible. My French and Russian is bad, to say the least. I doubt I have a vocabulary of more than 200 words in each, but I have no problems reading, for example, EGA [1]. Also there are entire journals in the field publicising translations of articles, which seems to contradict your claim that bleeding-edge scientific concepts are non-translatable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89l%C3%A9ments_de_g%C3%A9o...

Mathamatics is not like other fields - it isn't even really a science.

The non-mathamtical language used in mathamatics papers is easily translated, but understanding the maths is impossible without the required background and it can't be translated into any natural human language. Maths uses a synthetic symbolic language which mathematicians around the world share allowing them to communicate - in the natural sciences we use English instead.

> I have yet to come across any concept in any human language that can’t be expressed in English.

And all turing-complete programming languages are technically equivalent; what's your point?

That there is no knowledge that can't be communicated in English. Actually not all languages are equivalent because many concepts can only be expressed in English as all other languages lack the vocabulary to express many scientific and technical concepts. Right now English really is the only language that can be used to express a lot of concepts.

And most of those scientific and technical words in English are actually borrowed from other languages in the first place.

Even the words "science" and "technique" and "compute." Latin and French. Basic stuff like "icon." Greek. "Algebra" and "alcohol" and some other words that start with "al-"; Arabic.

I could go on to force the point but it already feels bizarre having to point out the obvious..

If English can wantonly borrow from other languages then pretend it's the only language that can express these things, why can't other languages borrow those words from English and pretend they're a part of them?

It is not that you can’t in principle express any concept in any other language, just that in most cases the vocabulary doesn’t exist in that language. In Newton’s time it was not possible to write most scientific papers in English as English lacked the required terms and concepts (everyone wrote in Latin).

For a whole series of historical reasons English has become the international language of science resulting in most new concepts only being expressible in English. We could of course change to a new language, but we would need to make up new terms to map all the existing concept onto in this new language. It might happen in the future, but right now there is no major effort to move science from English.

> just that in most cases the vocabulary doesn’t exist in that language.

Again you keep insisting that certain vocabulary doesn't exist in other languages, right after I provided some examples of vocabulary that do/did not exist in English!

If a language decides to incorporate, say, "science" into its vocabulary, does that make it any more limited than English when English itself took the word from French/Latin?

The argument in this thread was never about vocabulary, as all languages have been borrowing from each other since forever and are free to keep doing so. English does not have a trademark on words, especially ones that it itself took from other languages.

The initial point was that you lose nuance, intent, conciseness and artistic value. Take "throwing star" versus "shuriken", or "raw seafood" against "sushi." Does English have words for those objects or concepts? "Throwing star" is a clumsy phrase that has to be disambiguated from a solar star, or is it a celebrity known for his or her throwing skills?

Many poems, jokes or idioms fall apart right away when translated literally, or lose their punch or intended effect when "explained" in another language. The world would be an insanely dull and boring place with just one language.

> Take "throwing star" versus "shuriken", or "raw seafood" against "sushi." Does English have words for those objects or concepts?

Um, yes. It has the words "shuriken" and "sushi". We didn't invent those words, but we found them useful, so we kept them.

Presumably, if the cultures that used lots of shuriken and ate lots of sushi had been English-speaking, they would still have invented words for them.

I think you have missed my point. On your final point I don't think the world would be be an insanely dull and boring place with just one language. It would be a different world, but not dull.

Alan Perlis said, "A programming language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing."

Similarly, it might be said that a human language that doesn't affect your world-view is not worth learning. The language is the door to the culture.

Bingo. I've learned more about English itself the past couple years studying Thai than I have since I was a young child; particularly how daft our orthography is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Defective...

One of the strengths of English is that it adapts by assimilation from other language; if it were the only language around it would stagnate.

Where another language lacks the vocabulary, the concept could be expressed through explanation, or through assimilation of that word from English, construction of a new word that makes etymological sense, etc. There isn't anything extra that can be done in English that couldn't be done in another language to express new concepts.

This is true, but it is a massive job to do this translation so it does not get done. Many scientific concepts are only known by a handful of people in the world (i.e. those formed at the cutting edge) and are only able to be expressed in English.

There is nothing inherently superior about English as a language (other than it being my native language), just that it is the common language of science and so it is the language in which the majority of new concepts are communicated.

Philosophy for one is full of untranslatable subtle distinctions.

German has "Seiendes" x "Sein". French has "l'étant x l'étre". English has just "being"; and then people think Heidegger is gibberish.