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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
German has "Seiendes" x "Sein". French has "l'étant x l'étre". English has just "being"; and then people think Heidegger is gibberish.
And all turing-complete programming languages are technically equivalent; what's your point?