it's really hard to be precise in other languages. whereas in english there's always a way to express a thought with precision, even if it takes more words to do so

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5811552&forum_id=2]#49518261)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3laAXxtsULY

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5811552&forum_id=2]#49518650)

English is obsessed with when and whether something is finished.

Examples:

I ate

I was eating

I have eaten

I had been eating

Many languages collapse these:

Spanish: comí vs estaba comiendo (less granular)

Mandarin: no tense at all; relies on context or particles

Arabic/Russian: fewer aspect combinations

English forces you to commit:

Was it completed?

Was it ongoing?

Does it still matter now?

You can’t dodge that choice.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5811552&forum_id=2]#49518861)

everything is contextual. there's no precision. it's totally laughable

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5811552&forum_id=2]#49518874)

I ate - comí

I was eating - Estaba comiendo

I have eaten - He comido

I had been eating - Había estado comiendo

In addition:

Present

I eat - como

I am eating - estoy comiendo

I have eaten - he comido

I have been eating - he estado comiendo

Past

I ate - comí

I was eating - estaba comiendo

I had eaten - había comido

I had been eating - había estado comiendo

Future

I will eat - comeré / voy a comer (I'm going to eat)

I will be eating - estaré comiendo

I will have eaten - habré comido

I will have been eating - habré estado comiendo

Conditional

I would eat - comería

I would be eating - estaría comiendo

I would have eaten - habría comido

I would have been eating - habría estado comiendo

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5811552&forum_id=2]#49519620)

must (obligation)

have to (external obligation)

should (expectation)

might / may (probability gradient)

could (conditional ability)

Many languages reuse one form and rely on tone or context.

English makes you declare certainty, permission, or obligation explicitly.

That’s legal-contract gold.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5811552&forum_id=2]#49518862)

Some languages force commitments English doesn't:

Evidentiality (Turkish, Quechua, some Tibetan languages): You must grammatically mark whether you saw something yourself, heard about it, or inferred it. English can only do this lexically ("apparently," "I heard that").

Clusivity (many Austronesian, Dravidian languages): "We" must specify whether it includes the listener or not. English "we" is ambiguous.

Honorific commitment (Korean, Japanese): You cannot speak without encoding your social relationship to the listener. English lets you dodge this.

The Synthesis

So yes—English forces unusually specific commitments about temporal structure and epistemic stance. That's not a universal superiority, but it's a genuine precision advantage for domains like law, contracts, and analytic argumentation where those specific axes matter.

The precision isn't inherent to English—it's that English obligatorizes distinctions that happen to align well with the concerns of legal and scientific discourse as historically developed in English-speaking contexts. Other languages obligatorize different distinctions that serve other purposes equally well.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5811552&forum_id=2]#49518891)

Also "You cannot speak without encoding your social relationship to the listener" is a plus of English, not a fault.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5811552&forum_id=2]#49518899)

仁 (rén)

Usually translated as "benevolence," "humaneness," or "goodness"—but none capture it. Rén is the central virtue in Confucian ethics, and it encompasses:

A felt connection to others' suffering (closer to compassion)

The cultivation of character that makes one fully human

The enactment of proper relationships

An almost aesthetic sense of moral beauty

The English "benevolence" is too passive and paternalistic; "humaneness" too abstract; "love" too emotional and undisciplined. Rén implies effortful cultivation toward an ideal of human flourishing expressed through social relations. English lacks a single term for "the virtue of being fully and properly human in relation to others."

義 (yì)

Often rendered "righteousness" or "justice," but yì specifically means appropriate action given one's role and circumstances. It's contextual and relational in ways "righteousness" (which implies fixed rules) is not. Yì is doing the right thing for a friend because they are your friend, not because of universal principle. English moral vocabulary, shaped by Kantian universalism, struggles with this role-specific conception.

禮 (lǐ)

Translated as "ritual," "propriety," or "etiquette"—all inadequate. Lǐ refers to:

Formal ceremonies

Everyday social norms and manners

The aesthetic form of moral action

The inherited patterns that constitute civilization itself

It treats etiquette, ritual, ethics, and social structure as a unified phenomenon. English separates these into different categories and lacks a term for their unity.

道 (dào)

"The Way" is the standard translation, but dào simultaneously means:

A path or road (literal)

A method or skill ("the way of the sword")

The correct course of action

The underlying pattern or principle of reality

In Daoism, the ineffable source of all things

The metaphysical and practical meanings are fused. English has no word that bridges "method," "path," "principle," and "ultimate reality" as a single concept.

氣 (qì)

Often rendered "vital energy," "life force," or left untranslated as "chi." But qì in Chinese thought is:

The breath

The stuff that constitutes both matter and energy

The animating force in living things

The atmosphere or mood of a place

One's personal vitality or temperament

It's a monistic concept that bridges what English treats as separate categories (physical, biological, psychological, atmospheric). "Energy" is too physics-derived; "spirit" too immaterial.

Japanese Aesthetic Terms

物の哀れ (mono no aware)

Literally "the pathos of things." This 18th-century literary concept names the bittersweet emotional response to:

The transience of beauty

The passing of seasons

The fading of relationships

The awareness that what moves us will not last

English has "melancholy," "wistfulness," "bittersweetness"—but mono no aware is specifically the appreciation of sadness as an aesthetic and spiritual good, not merely the experience of it. It's the catch in your throat at cherry blossoms falling, understood as a form of heightened awareness rather than mere sadness.

侘寂 (wabi-sabi)

Two terms that merged over centuries:

Wabi: Originally poverty or insufficiency, later the beauty found in simplicity, rusticity, and austerity

Sabi: The beauty of age, wear, and impermanence

Together they name an aesthetic that finds beauty in:

Asymmetry and irregularity

Roughness and weathering

Incompleteness

The evidence of time's passage

English can describe these qualities but lacks a term that treats them as a unified aesthetic category—and moreover as a positive one. English aesthetic vocabulary tends toward perfection, completion, and permanence as ideals.

幽玄 (yūgen)

A key term in Noh drama and classical poetics meaning:

Profound depth and mystery

Beauty that is suggested rather than revealed

An awareness of the universe that triggers emotional depth

It's been described as "watching the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill" or "wandering in a great forest without thought of return." English has "mystery," "profundity," "sublimity"—but yūgen specifically values concealment and suggestion over revelation. The beauty is in what's implied, not what's shown.

間 (ma)

Literally "gap" or "space," but as an aesthetic concept ma refers to:

The pause between notes in music

Empty space in visual composition

Silence in conversation

The intervals that give form its meaning

English treats these as absences—"negative space," "pause," "silence." Japanese ma treats the interval as itself a positive presence that creates meaning. The concept resists translation because English lacks a term for meaningful emptiness as an active compositional element.

The Larger Point

These examples illustrate that precision isn't absolute—it's domain-specific. Chinese developed extraordinarily precise vocabulary for relational ethics and cosmology; Japanese for aesthetic experience and spatial awareness. English developed precise vocabulary for law, analytic philosophy, and individual rights. Each language's precision reflects what its intellectual traditions have cared most about elaborating.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5811552&forum_id=2]#49518869)

The Commercial Daily, our traditional newspaper, tried to save our civic honor with an erudite and rather confused essay concerning the antiquity and cultural influence of the Chinese in the Caribbean, and the right they had earned to participate in Poetic Festivals. The author of the essay did not doubt that the writer of the sonnet was in fact who he said he was, and he defended him in a straightforward manner, beginning with the title itself: "All Chinese Are Poets." The instigators of the plot, if there was one rotted in their graves along with the secret. For his part, the Chinese who had won died without confession at an Oriental age and was buried with the Golden orchid in his coffin, but also with the bitterness of never having achieved the only thing he wanted in his life, which was recognition as a poet. On his death, the press recalled the forgotten incident of the Poetic Festival and reprinted the sonnet with a Modernist vignette of fleshy maidens and gold cornucopias, and the guardian angels of poetry took advantage of the opportunity to clarify matters: the sonnet seemed so bad to the younger generation that no one doubt any longer that it had, in fact, been composed by the dead Chinese.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5811552&forum_id=2]#49518888)

jorge luis borges has that internet-famous clip with william buckley where he prefers english to spanish but even so -- try writing volumes of poetry in english borges! spanish is much easier

greek, latin, french, russian, probably german have their relative advantages and that's just from a western eurocentric perspective

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5811552&forum_id=2]#49519570)

A Stiff Instrument: He described English as "stiffish, artificial," good for describing nature or insects but lacking the directness needed for deep, intimate expression, like a "Rolls-Royce" compared to a "jeep".

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5811552&forum_id=2]#49519580)