Language is beautifully various

It is ironic that English has become the working language of technology, because it is so prone to variation.

This variation is unlocalizable and encodes a certain way of looking at the world.

“The residents of the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea have a hundred words for yams, while the Maoris of New Zealand have thirty-five words for dung. In the OED, round alone (that is without variants like rounded and roundup) takes 7 pages to define or about 15,000 words of text. English retains probably the richest vocabulary, and most diverse shading of meanings, of any language…. No other language has so many words all saying the same thing.” - Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue

Borges has a great interview on this, about why he likes working in English better than Spanish, and it’s because of how flexible it is. It has multiple registers, where you can say almost any concept in at least two ways: “Regal” which derives from Latin feels different than “kingly,” which derives from German. “Spirit” feels different than “ghost.”¹ ⊕ ¹ My family speaks English at home but my six year old son goes to school entirely in Spanish. One entertaining side effect of this is that he relies heavily on English cognates for the Spanish words he learns in school, resulting in very formal English coming out of a small child. He also says that you can do anything with verbs and prepositions in English: To come up on means something different than to come down on. You can live up to something or live it down.

I find those Germanic roots are also a great source of comedy in English. While reading a (truly awful) series of kids’ books, The Princess in Black, I noticed that the English version has characters named things like “Princess Sneezewort” and “Frimplepants.” Incredible Anglo-Saxon absurdity. Meanwhile, the Spanish version turns “Sneezewort” into “Margarita,” losing some silliness. The Spanish translation, however, gets veritable tongue-twisters of onomatopoeia.