We call these linguistic blind spots — not just missing words, but missing possibilities. Entire fields of thought, emotions, or metaphysical concepts can remain inarticulate simply because a given language lacks the aperture through which to speak them.
Let’s start with raw numbers:
- English: ~600,000 words
- French: ~200,000
- Latin (Vulgar): ~55,000
- Koine Greek: ~18,000
- Biblical Hebrew: ~9,898
And yet Biblical Hebrew built the Old Testament. Koine Greek gave birth to the Gospels. Vulgar Latin seeded empire and Church alike. Word count alone does not define depth. But it does shape bandwidth.
The Mirage of Translation
Try plugging this sentence into Latin through Google Translate:
“I’m thinking of going to the store later.”
You won’t get a faithful rendering of casual, temporal intent. Instead, Latin might reduce this to a kind of military declaration:
“I go to market.”
The tone is formal, direct, and stripped of mental nuance. Thought is often absent. Contingency is lost. Latin doesn't carry “maybe” as lightly as English does. What English says effortlessly, ancient tongues evade.
And yet those same ancient languages bore our myths, creeds, and cosmologies. They didn’t lack intelligence — they simply expressed it in denser symbolic form, sometimes compressing meaning into singular holy sounds: Amen, Logos, Ruach, Dharma.
Borrowed Eyes for Inner Worlds
When we first named the eerie feeling of experiencing something “again,” we didn’t describe it — we borrowed it. Déjà vu, a French phrase, captured the moment in two syllables.
Likewise, karma — not an English word — carries a dense, cyclical view of causality that Western thought struggled for centuries to phrase. When English lacks precision, it imports. This is its gift.
In this sense, English becomes the linguistic sponge of civilization:
• Greek gives us logos and epiphany
• Hebrew gives us shalom and amen
• Sanskrit gives us chakra, nirvana, avatar
• French gives us rendezvous, ennui, déjà vu
• German gives us zeitgeist, weltschmerz, schadenfreude
• Russian offers toska (a soul-level ache with no direct English equivalent)
But English doesn’t just borrow. It aggregates, refines, and juxtaposes. This makes it, arguably, the most expressive language for complex thought, nuance, and recursive abstraction — especially in fields like consciousness, AI, mathematics, and symbolic theory.
The English Asymptote
English is becoming a kind of cognitive asymptote — a language that approaches total expressivity without ever arriving. Every new domain adds words. Every subculture generates slang. Every AI update requires new labels for the unknowable.
Other languages carry weight:
• Russian is a tank — heavy, powerful, but slow to maneuver.
• French is a violin — beautiful, exacting, tonal.
• Latin is a sword — formal, cutting, ritual.
• Hebrew is a root system — symbolic, divine, recursive.
• English is a processor — messy, fast, always integrating.
And as academia.edu now shows us, the convergence of consciousness, AI, and theoretical physics — the true frontier — is being argued in English.
Not because it’s the most spiritual.
Not because it’s the most ancient.
But because you can actually say what you mean.
Even if — especially if — you’re inventing new meanings as you go.