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Gotten the hang of Southern Sotho at this point, and one thing that strikes me is how exact I can be with English and how I've always taken for granted how much access we have to things that allow us to give our words different meanings and implications. It just doesn't exist to that extent in many other languages. It's like when you hear the Eskimos have 50 words for snow or whatever. I don't know if it's true or not, but those words would describe different states or types of snow that speakers of that language recognize as distinct.
Also I watched this recently: https://youtu.be/NJYoqCDKoT4?si=Ppsm10i4ovI6M99g
Are you sure this is not just your perception depending on fluency in a language? Your native will always feel more comprehensive than any second language.
A while ago, my dad (native german, fluent english) said something similar to me, that he believes german has so many more words to describe and to give different meaning to the things we say. I do disagree with that too. Now I always have to think about this, when coming across something I have more means to express something in english or german. And there are many examples in both languages.
Even if you are fluent in a second language, you probably always have more words and more nuance in your native language.
Great point! I considered that when I started learning and have spoken to it with my colleagues here who are also learning the language as well as Basotho- native speakers. Basotho who speak English fluently mostly agree that English has a broader vocabulary.
I've observed that Sesotho relies on tone and emphasis on parts of words more than English. There isn't a whole lot of writing in Sesotho so I can imagine that the language hasn't needed to develop ways to be descriptive that couldn't be delivered with one's voice.
Moreover, when I speak with Basotho that aren't very proficient in English, I notice they very freely use words that a native English speaker would consider extreme, such as "perfect," for mundane things because there is no explicit difference in Sesotho between "perfect" and merely "very good."
The video I linked gets into it a bit that English is helped by being an amalgamation of several languages, and thus inherits multiple ways of describing a concept.
For native speakers, there is also the level of education and the contexts they use it in that can influence their vocabulary. I know a lot of Spanish speakers, both heritage speakers and those who grew up in Spanish a speaking countries. Heritage speakers often are educated in English and mostly use Spanish at home and in social situations, but are more comfortable in English for other topics. Lots of my coworkers who grew up in Spanish speaking countries have pretty limited formal education. In either case, they often don't know the Spanish terms for technical, scientific or political contexts, and will just use the English word, even in Spanish.
This doesn't mean that English has a richer political or technical vocabulary than Spanish, but it does create a chicken and egg situation in certain contexts. Why bother to learn and use the Spanish term if the English term is already more widely known, especially if it isn't a topic that would lend itself to popular publications and discussions outside of industrial or academic contexts? Even in Spanish speaking countries, the increasing dominance of English internationally can result in highly educated people in these countries being pressured to publish in English, further reducing the number of occasions one might have to use these terms in Spanish.