Language Influences Thought

Russian has a kazillion variants for its verbs, but they all mean slightly different things -- they're not quite synonyms. English started as a Germanic language, then piled on large amounts of Latin and French, then threw in some Norse, then grabbed bits of everything it ever rubbed against. So there are whole sets of exact synonyms, and they're often paired, like "aid and abet."

>>there is a theory called "semantic completeness" that states that any thought can be expressed in any language, <<

In theory, yes. In practice, each language encodes and facilities expressing those concepts that its speakers value and use the most. Conversely, it will have fewer or no words and features for things they don't talk about much or at all. So for some words, there is a direct translation, while others require several words. And then there are concepts that go against the grain of the language, or are themselves based on concepts that also don't exist in the language, or rely on semantic features the language doesn't have. That's where you get into translations that take a page of explanation or 5+ minutes of discussion. IF your audience can follow all that, and doesn't just get bored and change the subject.

>> with the implication that any language can expand to include any new notions. <<

This is possible, but it doesn't always happen. That particular issue is cultural rather than linguistic: a language is a living growing thing, but a culture can get stubborn and refuse to change. Some cultures are more inclined to embrace change, including linguistic change. Others are downright stuffy.

>> i daresay japanese speakers would be a mite insulted at your implication that their language lacks subtlety <<

It's not a matter of lacking subtlety, but rather, a difference in design. Japanese is a very structured, very precise language. There is often one right way to say something, based on rules that dictate which out of a bunch of similar-seeming words is appropriate to the occasion. That's often based on politeness, which is a prevailing feature in Japanese, although there are other groupings -- some words that only men use, or only women use, or are only used to describe either men or women.

Translating from Japanese to English can be challenging because Japanese encodes a lot of social dynamics into the grammar and word choice, whereas English pretty much does that only with word choice and once two people are using the same register even that doesn't signal much. You can still express similar ideas but doing so in English is often clunkier and lengthier. It's the difference between having a proper cherry pitter and pitting cherries with a paring knife.

English is a good example, because it's so diverse. That's one thing that makes it popular. You can do a lot of things very easily in English, and there aren't too many subjects for which it's a lousy language.

*sigh* I work in areas for which English is far less convenient than, say, Lakota, Hawai'ian, Sanskrit, or LAadan. If you are not talking about a major monotheistic religion, there are a great many spiritual concepts for which English either doesn't have the words or has words with the wrong connotations. If you're talking about magic, there are few words period, you're short on verbs especially, and again the connotations are more derogatory than useful. If you're talking about sex and gender, and you want to go beyond the standard male/masculine and female/feminine, the grammar fights you and it's hard to find good substitutes that don't sound horribly awkward. Putting two of these together, for instance, there's no pronoun set for Deity and no elegant way to talk about Deity without assigning a gender (because "it" is subtly pejorative). And all of these cause very significant problems for certain people all the time.

All languages have their own strengths and weaknesses, just as individual people or cultures do. They focus on things that are important to them, which makes sense.

At present, I'm interested in asexuality, which has a developing community awareness around a sexual orientation that hasn't gotten much attention previously. The semantic landscape for this topic, in English, consists mostly of lexical gaps interspersed with rubble ripped out of some other part of the language. Frex, "asexual" was borrowed from biology (such as amoeba reproduction) and carries with it certain connotations that haven't been rubbed off yet; a drawback of this is that there are still plenty of people who argue that using "asexual" in reference to humans is WRONG. Well, they had to pick something. They're still trying to identify concepts and borrow or create terms for those, so that they can talk about their experiences. It's hard work. English is just not designed to handle this. It can be beaten into a shape that will serve, but you have to do a lot of beating before you can even start the conversation. Then you have to do it again every time you come to another gap where there's no previous word for what you want to say. That's exhausting and frustrating. Right now, English is not a good language for discussing this topic. Wait 20 years or so, and we'll probably have a much better vocabulary for the subject, but the grammar may be the same. (Normally, the grammar WOULD be the same; but the language is in total flux, probably due to online interactions, so all rules are subject to change.) At that point, English will be a better language for talking about asexuality. Right now, it's rugged.