Timeline for Is English the most descriptive language?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 30, 2018 at 21:55 | review | Close votes | |||
| Aug 8, 2018 at 3:05 | |||||
| Mar 16, 2018 at 5:27 | answer | added | Luís Henrique | timeline score: 0 | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 20:40 | comment | added | Adam Bittlingmayer | For multilingual people, different languages almost always have different roles in our lives. Their expressiveness definitely varies for us by domain. It is not an inherent property of the language though, it is because of the experiences - family and early childhood, songs, cuisine, university, career and so on. So it is not any sort of scientific experiment, quite the opposite. | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 20:36 | comment | added | Adam Bittlingmayer | The thing is, personal experiences are not really allowed in SE answers. My opinion is that expressiveness varies more by culture and from person to person. Fisherman have a lot of words for fishing, but it is not a property of their language per say, if by language we mean something with an ISO code like English or German. | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 14:34 | answer | added | tripleee | timeline score: 3 | |
| Mar 13, 2018 at 23:55 | history | edited | Greg | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Clarification
|
| Mar 13, 2018 at 13:28 | comment | added | Luke Sawczak | Is French the most academic language? Is Italian the most romantic language? Is German the most businesslike language? Is Mandarin the most philosophical language? Is Murrican the most patriotic language? Is Greek the most hilarious language? Is Japanese the most adorable language? Is Arabic the most complicated language? Is Hebrew the most concrete language? To all of these questions I give a resounding shrug, though they once fascinated linguistic commentators. To be fair, your question includes no hint of the stereotyping behind some of them. | |
| Mar 12, 2018 at 18:17 | answer | added | Adam Bittlingmayer | timeline score: 8 | |
| Mar 12, 2018 at 17:13 | comment | added | LjL | Even if we found a quantitative framework for your question, I'd wager that among the thousands of languages spoken on this planet, it'd be extremely unlikely that English in particular just so happened to be "the" most descriptive one, notwithstanding how widespread it currently is. Since you say English is the only language you know, is it possible perhaps that your impression of it having comparatively many different ways to express a thought mainly stems from your lack of knowledge of ways other languages do have (perhaps in different contexts, further complicating the perceptual issue)? | |
| Mar 12, 2018 at 16:31 | answer | added | user6726 | timeline score: 5 | |
| Mar 12, 2018 at 15:00 | review | Close votes | |||
| Mar 20, 2018 at 3:03 | |||||
| Mar 12, 2018 at 14:28 | comment | added | Sir Cornflakes | This is an interesting question about a rather intuitive and difficult to formalise feature of different languages. I tend to say yes, based on experience with some other European languages. | |
| Mar 12, 2018 at 13:58 | review | First posts | |||
| Mar 12, 2018 at 15:33 | |||||
| Mar 12, 2018 at 13:55 | history | asked | Greg | CC BY-SA 3.0 |