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Comment by missosoup | Hacker News Reader

Some languages are inherently less expressive than others. English is not very expressive and therefore a large number of words phrases and idioms don't have an analogue that makes sense in english. Trying to reduce them to something that makes sense is like trying to explain a joke. It defeats the purpose.

Anyone who speaks >1 languages is aware of this.

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> Some languages are inherently less expressive than others. English is not very expressive...

I call bullshit. Do you have any justification for this claim?

Do you have any justification for calling bullshit on him?

I’m not the OP, but the fact that out of the thousands of professional academic linguists, none has ever seriously proposed and defined an “expressiveness scale” suggests that we would need extraordinary evidence to accept an HN comment claiming to have done so.

I have never heard of any objective measure of "expressiveness" of human languages.

The fact that information density across languages was measured and there was no significant difference[0]. How can a language be more expressive yet contain just as much information.

[0]: https://www.science20.com/content/information_density_all_la...

Yeah I speak 3 languages and all 3 have mutually exclusive constructs that can't be translated while carrying over the 'true meaning'. English is by far the least expressive of the 3.

A common example is slavic мат. A repertoire of profanities that simply have no English translation, no equivalent, not even a meaningful loose translation/explanation. The best you can do is find the nearest approximate meaningful English construct, but it's a bit like projecting 3d space onto a 2d plane. You fundamentally lose information.

I'm not sure what you're calling bullshit on. The fact that not all languages 1:1 map to each other especially when some classes of languages have fundamentally different constructs like gendered variants of every word, or the fact that some languages are more or less expressive, or the fact that English falls to the side of the less expressive scale. All 3 of these statements are trivial to verify with a couple google searches without even being a multilingual speaker.

I'm calling bullshit on the claim that languages can be placed on a scale of expressiveness. You will first have to define expressiveness and then how to measure it.

This is an entirely subjective judgment on your part that you are advancing as though it were a matter of fact. Have you considered the possibility that you know English least well of your three languages, and that you are therefore better able to express yourself in the other two? Also, please provide a source for your "fact" that some languages are inherently more "expressive" than others (whatever that means).

I provided a trivial and concrete example: мат. English is inherently incapable of expressing мат.

And English being my strongest language, I'd say no, I don't think it's because I know it least well of the three.

Perhaps this is just something that doesn't make sense to people who only know one language, but it self-evident to multilinguals.

If you want a source, click TFA - a list of German expressions that don't exist in English. The discussion here on whether or not it's a great list, but no one disagrees there are phrases that don't exist in English.

Seems to me like мат is just "yo mama".

But that goes both ways. If we accept that "urspung" does not translate directly to "origin", then obviously "origin" does not translate directly to "ursprung" either. So I don't see how this proves one language is more expressive than another?

Unless you can somehow prove that any English word or phrase have a direct German translation but not vice-versa.

Introspection has long ceased to be a valid methodology in linguistics. Lack of a 1:1 mapping between languages clearly does not imply that you "fundamentally lose information". Just because it takes a language two words to express a concept that another language can express using a single word obviously does not mean that the first language is somehow unable to fully express the meaning of the concept.

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