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