Language encodes within it's systems, a built-up treasure trove of human meaning. A universal language looses a humongous amount of meaning. Its usefulness is in merely communicating functionality. In short, such a "universal" will fragment for the need to enrich this substandard language. Remember, human language needs to be rich.
I'm not sure that any meaning is truly lost. Can you find a word in any language that isn't described by a short sentence in English? The differences seem mostly in the level of verbosity required to elucidate an idea.
The problem is that it’s not just words. For instance, if you speak Tariana, every grammatical sentence must have a marker expressing how you know the sentence is true (‘evidentiality’). In Kalam, you only have ~100 verbs, all of which have extremely broad meanings, and any more complex verbal meaning must be created by composing together the verbs you have available. In White Hmong, every noun can occur with a ‘classifier’; its presence or absence specifies whether the noun has been newly introduced or not. And sure, I suppose you could lump all these together as ‘differences in verbosity’, but those differences matter: they mean that the most natural way to express something in Tariana, say, is going to be very different to the most natural way to express something in English, and a translation would lose some of the meaning of the Tariana sentence. (And a complete translation, losing no meaning whatsoever, would end up so verbose as to be almost useless.)
Can you give a specific example of a word in Kalam or Tariana that cannot be expressed with a short sentence in English? It would follow that a short sentence in Kalam or Tariana may translate to a long sentence or short paragraph in English. I'm sure the same would be true the other way around. But doesn't this reinforce the idea that the difference is mainly in verbosity? And that the differences lie in which ideas can be expressed concisely and which must be expressed verbosely?
> Can you give a specific example of a word in Kalam or Tariana that cannot be expressed with a short sentence in English? It would follow that a short sentence in Kalam or Tariana may translate to a long sentence or short paragraph in English.
I’m not sure there are any examples which cannot be expressed with a short English sentence, but here’s one from Tariana:
Masitetakakakadekaɾupidanapitaniki.
‘We did not make each other smoke again at all, so I leant from someone else.’
The problem with this translation is that it doesn’t completely get across the ‘feel’ of the original — e.g. the fact that this information was learnt from someone else is an integral part of the original sentence, whereas specifying this in English feels somewhat unnatural.
> I'm sure the same would be true the other way around.
Exactly. A Kalam example:
Bin ak ñapanŋaŋ anup sop ak wki d ap tan d ap yap geb.
‘The woman is soaping her child.’
> And that the differences lie in which ideas can be expressed concisely and which must be expressed verbosely?
This is not something I entirely disagree with. Generally speaking, anything which can be expressed in one language can be expressed in another. The differences go beyond verbosity though: it is often the case that such a complete translation sounds really unnatural. For instance, Kalam sentences make it easy to express motion, so you get a lot of sentences like:
Bin pataj ogok am yg pak dad ap-elgp-al…
woman young the go dig hit carrying come-PST.HAB-3PL…
A literal translation would be ‘Young women used to go and dig and hit and carry and come back’, which doesn’t sound English-like at all. A more idiomatic translation might be something like, ‘Young women used to dig for rodents and kill them’, which focuses less on the sequence of events involved, but places more focus on the animals which were killed — something which is unusual in a Kalam sentence.
