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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

As fluent speaker in several languages, and given that European travellers speak on average three languages (native, resident country and English) I completely disagree.

Languages are a way to express culture of a country and there are many words that never translate well between languages, because they express ideas or points of view not present in the target languages.

Usually this idea of one language to rule them all, seems to keep coming up from cultures not able to bother to learn anything else other than English.

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> Usually this idea of one language to rule them all, seems to keep coming up from cultures not able to bother to learn anything else other than English.

That's not the case in my experience. The drive for the "international auxiliary language" movement, one global language for communication, largely arose from Europe, particularly Eastern Europe. Esperanto was created by a Pole, Volapük a German, the first Interlingua an Italian, the second Interlingua a German who emigrated to the US.

There have always been international languages since mankid has been able to speak and started travelling on the old world, that grew organically from the interaction between those travellers.

Or imposed by the new rulers after conquering a new territory.

Artificial created languages never gained any meaningful ground.

Fun fact: In Danish the word volapük has come to mean nonsense.

Also in Esperanto (volapukaĵo; kind of harsh toward a fellow IAL, I think).

Other fun fact: Volapük has no letter r, because Schleyer though it would be difficult for Chinese speakers to pronounce. It is difficult for Cantonese speakers, but prevocalic and postvocalic r are both present in Mandarin, so its speakers (i.e. the majority of Chinese) have no trouble pronouncing it.

>there are many words that never translate well between languages

Then it becomes a new word in that language. I think this is why english gains ground, because it eats new words constantly.

Becoming a new work won't be the same as in the original culture, just yet another case of lost in translation.

You might translate saudade to mean home sick, missing someone, missing a place, missing an event, not being able to do something, feeling blue, among a few other possibilities.

However none of them actually express 100% the same meaning as a native Portuguese speaker might be feeling when he/she says that word, because there is a mix of feelings and situations related in that single word.

Or for example, the ways an Eskimo might describe a frozen landscape.

It works, see for example smörgåsbord -> smorgasbord. They have exactly the same meaning.

But after reading the definition I completely understand the meaning of it. And if saudade becomes popular enough, eventually it will be usable in everyday english. For example look at schadenfreude.

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