>>The reason English is so wildly inconsistent is because English will take
>>these "untranslatable" words and assimilate them. While the sublties and
>>connotations might be lost, the central meaning will remain, adding to the
>>vocabulary. This is why English has the largest vocabulary of any language.
>>Somthing like ~300k words as compared to ~100k words for an "average"
>>modern language, IIRC.
>
>The reason that happens is because there exists no academic body that
>determines what is or isn't English. For instance, for French,
>there's l'Academie Française, which determines what is and isn't
>official French.

Yeah, I heard about that. Not only does it keep French 'pure' it stamped out every other language (Breton for example) spoken in France by banning them from the schools. Nice to know freedom of speech is so respected.

drakensisthered

So I simply said one of the great trite truths: "There is generally more than one side to a story." - Corwin, Roger Zelazny's 'Courts of Chaos'