I've read refreshingly concise modern works in both and English and German and can assure you that style is the writer's fault, not the language's.
To be fair that could describe a lot of philosophy in just about every language.
I can imagine that this ability makes different thoughts possible.
When looking at programming languages, it is indeed the case that your "lingua franca" limits the imagination of what software architectures are possible to solve the problem.
https://aymara.org/biblio/html/igr/igr3.html
Or just use of 無 in (ancient) Chinese for a simple example (in the sense of "unasking the question").
I always thought it was remarkable how much human thought was imprisoned by language, and it really makes me wonder what a human 'without language' would be capable of thinking.
To clarify, I don't disagree with what you're saying; I'm not a linguist but from what I know there certainly seems to be some truth in the weaker forms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that language affects how you think), but the strong form (that language controls how you think) seems fairly well disproven these days.
No expert and not disagreeing with you, but I'd be very interested to read any literature you can recommend on the subject.
Linguistic relativity
Very well modernized, from the already simple chinese language (not the writing, just the spoken language), transported into simple and regular syllables. Extremely easy to learn for foreigners or aliens from other planets. The shape of the letters mimic how you speak them, the three major families - | or O. horizontal, vertical or round, like in chinese earth-water paintings.
It's much more regular than separating vowels and consonants into single letters.
Slight exaggeration.
I do agree that German is a beautiful language, though, and highly recommend reading Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra to anyone who does or does not agree with me on this one.
"Don't always make this about you!"
There is no exactly matching equivalent in German. You might say something like 'this isn't about you', but there is no term for calling someone out on it so beautifully and bluntly.
But to me it makes no sense to make absolute statements on conciseness. In my opinion societies are concise in language on topics on which a great common focus lies upon.
German: Es geht nicht immer nur um dich!
Not a 100% word for word translation, but what I would yell when I meant to say something similar to the English version. Instead of "make it (about you)" I switch to something that reverse-translated ends up more like "it is not about you" because trying to use the "make" part in a 100% word for word translation does not seem to lead to anything I as a German might say. Still, I'd say my version actually is an accurate translation, so I would dispute your claim that "there is no exactly matching equivalent in German".
As a native German speaker, I disagree. German allows a really concise nominal style that is hard to express in English.
I'm reminded of my former neighbors, who would switch between English and Spanish mid-sentence. I asked them about it once and they expressed a sentiment similar to yours.
As an English and German speaker, my kids would tell you I sometimes do the same thing. Bad drivers get yelled at in German ;-D
But on the other hand that makes german much longer. Translations into german (e.g. SW or movie subtitles) are the longest in german than in any other major language. You need much more room to express the same. E.g. in SW translations this conciseness strikes back, the english original form is often preferred, as it is easier to understand and not as baroque as the german form.
In Japanese forced with the same problem of having to import many new foreign terms ("lehnworte"), they chose a better way, Katakana, which is almost as well modernized as Korean. In German it backfired, and instead of chosing modern shorter and more precise forms, they want for the longer nouns, adding to it.
I can believe that if you translate texts that are written in idiomatic English into German, they get longer. On the other hand, if you have a concisely written scientific text in German, translating it into English leads to something between gibberish and something barely readable. So you often have to completely rewrite/reexpress large parts of the text so that it looks like idiomatic English.
An example: https://medium.com/dropbox-design/design-for-internationaliz...
From what I can see guidance is that Finnish and German are typically quite a bit longer than English...
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I used to believe that "Latin is a dead language" - until I learnt more about the subject. It was spoken everywhere in the Roman Empire, and the local differences evolved into the Romance languages. They are what Latin is today. And it (the relatively fixed 'classical' version anyway) was a universal language for a long time....until the 19th C in maths and the sciences. Thousands of years is a long time in language-years, and nothing stays still for that long, but changes totally. Latin's dead in the sense every language must be after thousands of years of evolution. English will be dead in that same sense in another 2000 years, and so will every other language of today.
The interesting part is they do not invent new words but find existing Latin expressions and combine existing words. That alone speaks a lot of how universal the language was and perhaps still is.
Link: https://areena.yle.fi/1-1931339
An example of the Indonesian tsunami catastrophy: "Plus mille quadringenti homines perierunt, cum fluctus tsunami ex motu terrae ortus in insulam Sulawesi Indonesiae (28.9.) incidisset. Magistratus timent, ne numerus victimarum in multa milia ascendat. Maxime afflicta est urbs Palu et proxima illi Donggala. In regione motui terrae et fluctui exposita circiter sescenta milia hominum habitant."
That’s the same as looking at a tree and saying, “This is what I will be in a hundred years.”
It's more like, say, there was jazz in the 1920s, there are many types of jazz today, evolved from that early jazz but all very different from it, and different from each other.
I alternately love and hate German. Sometimes I have to fight through sentences with 5 clauses, and sometimes you get a beautiful and concise statement.
Who is "they"? As a German who also has one friend (fluent in two other languages and living abroad most of the time and married to a non-German) who is in that camp and who even collected money to give to a local German language society, this is a small minority. The majority of people could not care less. Proof: Use of English words and phrases is ubiquitous, used for shops (even that exact word instead of the German "(der) Laden"), signs, marketing campaigns, everyday language. If it didn't work or if it caused any backlash they would not do that. We even have "fake English" words: "Handy" for mobile phones (and that is the word almost everybody actually uses) :-)
There are at least 3 ways to say "the". Der, die, and das. Which one you use depends on if the object you're talking about is femanine or not. To top that off some geographic areas use "das" for everything.
It also has words that are similar to English; toilette (toilet) and hast (have) as a couple similarities.
some geographic areas use "das" for everything - yeah good point. If you ever tooled around the German-speaking sections of Switzerland you'll still find locals complaining that they have difficulty understanding the dialect of another town only a few km away.
The "nouns have gender" stuff isn't quite as weird. It's in many other languages and eventually it isn't too hard to learn the noun as the full "der/die/das ________". Where it gets tricky is when an article (like "der" or "einer") is overloaded and applies to one gender in one case (male, nominative) but to a different gender in another case (female or plural, dative). I wish the mapping were one to one.
It's also worth noting that there are actually two ways to _say_ "the" in English (think "thuh" and "thee"). I would challenge any native English speaker to explain when you use each. ;-)
I'd be surprised if you could find any fluent English speaker who says that either pronunciation is wrong in any context where the other is correct. If I'm understanding the description of the German definite articles correctly, the aren't all valid in the same contexts, which is hardly the same thing. (I don't actually know German, but I know a bit of Spanish and Dutch, and in both of those languages the definite articles are not necessarily interchangeable, which is my understanding of German from the above description)
If referring to written words then use thee if you find yourself in Pennsylvania Dutch country trying to hail a horse drawn taxi or thuh if trying to play dumb while text messaging.
On the other hand, Russian might be an even harder language to learn than German, given that it's Slavic and uses a different alphabet. There's always Esperanto, which has more than 200,000 articles on Wikipedia; more than Latin even.