This very much feels like a "scoreboard" sort of post. Meaning: look at the scoreboard. There's no actual reason to believe that German is a better language for philosophy than English. ... At least we would need to see some additional explanation as to WHY the English philosophical tradition by far is the strongest over the past 400 years. Somehow English has made up for its deficits? Some reason that Greek. German had a short period of dominance. France had more dominance than German. The ancient world Greek and Latin are absolutely of note, though, there can be a low hanging fruit argument there. Anyway, I am super on board with Language Essentialisms, but this is not a territory I would stake out. My personal work is in distinguishing thought patterns embedded in pre-conquest Nahuatl vs. conquest Spanish and English.
The two "whys" issue is very interesting. One aspect of [one of my deep Ph.D. type interests is native languages and linguistics] spoken languages (thus, for most folks, pre-conquest / pre-colonial) is that it is not obvious how to separate them into their particles. There are many that are indeed agglutinative. But also there's a reason that word spacing, punctuation, etc. are not part of even alphabetic writing in the 'ancient' world - scripta continua seemed natural because spoken language is a stream. Even the concept of "word" is not universal and obvious. Context is so important, right? When we think of English as having one "why" and some other language as having two "whys" - context solves almost all the problems. Modern Chinese doesn't have difficulty with having no verb tenses, for example, because context makes everything necessary clear to the users. It's not always - perhaps it is usually not - significant that one language has a single word where another language has a short phrase for a 'concept'.
This very much feels like a "scoreboard" sort of post. Meaning: look at the scoreboard. There's no actual reason to believe that German is a better language for philosophy than English. ... At least we would need to see some additional explanation as to WHY the English philosophical tradition by far is the strongest over the past 400 years. Somehow English has made up for its deficits? Some reason that Greek. German had a short period of dominance. France had more dominance than German. The ancient world Greek and Latin are absolutely of note, though, there can be a low hanging fruit argument there. Anyway, I am super on board with Language Essentialisms, but this is not a territory I would stake out. My personal work is in distinguishing thought patterns embedded in pre-conquest Nahuatl vs. conquest Spanish and English.
I was personally just curious about the two whys issue. No opinion on the linguistic essentialism.
The two "whys" issue is very interesting. One aspect of [one of my deep Ph.D. type interests is native languages and linguistics] spoken languages (thus, for most folks, pre-conquest / pre-colonial) is that it is not obvious how to separate them into their particles. There are many that are indeed agglutinative. But also there's a reason that word spacing, punctuation, etc. are not part of even alphabetic writing in the 'ancient' world - scripta continua seemed natural because spoken language is a stream. Even the concept of "word" is not universal and obvious. Context is so important, right? When we think of English as having one "why" and some other language as having two "whys" - context solves almost all the problems. Modern Chinese doesn't have difficulty with having no verb tenses, for example, because context makes everything necessary clear to the users. It's not always - perhaps it is usually not - significant that one language has a single word where another language has a short phrase for a 'concept'.