Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

Tom Wier wrote:
> But the only reason Schadenfreude is only roughly translated as"malicious pleasure" is
> that English speakers are not accustomed to
> making the subtle distinction the word presupposes.
Exactly.  My point was that it *is* only roughly translatable, I wasn't
theorizing on why we don't have an exact equivalent, only pointing out
that we don't, and that's true of many words.

> I would say rather that  it is not possible to determine at all one way or
> the other.  We might assume that all languages are roughly equally
> complex, but we have no means by which to evaluate our assumption.
> It will stand as just that.
That was pretty much my point.  However, I feel that if there *were* a
language of much greater complexity, or much greater usefullness, that
it would be obvious that it were so.

--
"It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father
was hanged." - Irish proverb
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