(June 18, 2023 at 3:48 pm)FlatAssembler Wrote: Well, sometimes the language does matter when discussing philosophy. Croatian, for example, has the same word for "belief" and "faith", and it is annoying to explain people that those are not the same thing. The guy who rode the airplane in 9/11 attack presumably believed in heaven, but most people don't, most people just have faith that heaven is real.
EDIT: And it's not just philosophy, it's also, for example, control engineering. Croatian has different words for the "gain" as in "gain of an amplifier" (we call that "pojačanje") and "gain" on the Bode Plots (we call that "amplituda"). The fact that English uses the same word for both makes it harder to understand English texts about control engineering.
Language study is wonderful! Different languages cause people to categorize the world in different ways, and when you learn the difference it teaches you that your accustomed ways are not the only ones.
Japanese has a lot of differences from English, which I've enjoyed learning about. For religion, the word kami is translated into English as "god" or "divine," but historically it's just not the same thing as what Europeans think of as God.
And there's surprising semantic categories. In the dictionary it says that blue is ao, 青, and green is midori, 緑, but they are used differently than in English. For example, traffic signals are called blue. Beginners, who would be called "green" in English, are blue.
Japanese has a lot more words for "love," which makes English seem a little imprecise. It sounds strange for a Japanese speaker to use the same word for loving your wife and loving ice cream.
