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I moved to Austria and I'm learning German, a putatively quasi-Romance language (shares a lot with Latin) that has a tiny fraction of the number of words that English has.

Yes, it's alternatingly irritating and hilarious to find how many animals we know by special names are called some variation of Cat or Bear, and I like to tell this as a joke, topping it off with the Katzenbär, which is both (Catbear). (A katzenbär is a red panda, in case you're wondering.)

But, at the same time, there is a lot of expressiveness in German that has no English equivalent. For example: schadenfreude. This is just one word of hundreds that are special, emotion-capturing words that have no real equivalent in English.

To argue that English is more expressive based on volume is silly.




"there is a lot of expressiveness in German that has no English equivalent", true for german and for many other languages (no need to mention asian ones where this is obvious). The word "Zeitgeits" comes to mind too.

And considering this, allyagg, i'm not convinced by your argument about vocabulary size, i've always felt the english vocabulary as quite compact (and thus more convenient to use compared to other more complex languages)...

EDIT: allyagg, a bit of googling proved you right :) From what i understand, english vocabulary seems more rich of "technical" terms while some other areas are less developed (i would say related to philosophy/poetry concepts for ger and ita for example ), rendering some words in other languages not directly translatable.




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