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It's never the complicated words.

It's the simple words. English doesn't have a translation for German Brot. The English word bread denotes something almost but not entirely unlike Brot.




Wait, I'm German and I use bread whenever I mean Brot. What am I doing wrong?


Compare Google image search: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!i+brot vs https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!i+bread

Have you ever had English bread? See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process

Basically, the two words fray at the connotations. The denotation is the same.


The criticisms ring hollow when you have to use a bunch of different languages to show the supposed paucity of English. Does German have a wabi-sabi? Does Japanese have a waldeinsamkeit?

It's a similar thing with animals, when people say humans are useless animals because we can't swim as well as dolphins or see as well as hawks, even though we swim better than hawks and see better than dolphins...


Oh, it's not a criticism of English, just an observation about tranlation in general. English has a lot of interesting weird words, too.

Eg German doesn't have a single word for English bread.


It's not a criticism, it's just an observation.




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