I`m a native portuguese speaker, and think that romantic languages can be more "emotional" than english. But its amazing how a new idea can be expressed so easilly in English.

German and Latin can create new words or ideas much easier than English can. English creates them 'easier' by wholesale importing them. Take the concept of 'karma', there is no word for this in English. In German this word is schicksal. This concept doesn't exist in English at all other than the Hindi import.

That said, your example is not a very good one. "Schicksal" can be translated as "fate", "fortune", "destiny" and "lot". Not just "karma".

Both languages have their expressive poets, authors, etc. It's easier to rhyme in Portuguese (it's almost like cheating, since the verbs all end in the same syllables), it's easier to modify the grammar classes of words in English (turning nouns into verbs and vice-versa), they both have rich vocabulary (although English seems to give more multiple meanings to individual words, and have more synonyms too). But in the end, I'd never call either of them more expressive than the other...

Portuguese, for example, is much more expressive in the sense that you can communicate the same idea in many different ways, which may have different meanings.

There is also the contractions issue and the omission of the subject of an expression ("eu estava" == "eu tava" == "tava" == "I was"), which complicates it even more. And all of this is actually valid, depending on the linguist you "follow". ;)

Well, I did not make myself very clear, but this is what I wanted mean when I talked about expressiveness.

PS: I wanted to write something about linguistic relativity too, but I can't remember, lol.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_%28programming_language%29