English is the most powerful human language and the universal medium for thought. I’d take mastery of English over multilingualism any time of the day.

Why is it the most powerful?

Precisely because of what Borges is explaining. It can express more things, with finer distinctions. Spanish to me feels like a strict subset of English these days (with some fun exceptions like “te quiero” vs “te amo”). The extensibility of the language with “phrasal verbs” (verb + preposition) confers expressive power. Anecdotally, it was very hard for me to layer it on top of my Spanish brain.

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Borges was a beautiful mind.

fr

lots of reasons why english prevailed and is the global language but concepts from Greek, Mandarin, Japanese, Mongolian can express thoughts and ideas English cant imo LLMs are this smart because they deeply understand nuances of every language, not bc of their english mastery

But you can’t say Éramos muchos y parió la abuela in English

English is inherently multilingual

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portuguese native speaker but english has taken over as the language in which i think. it really is about that combination of dead simple syntax and inherent "looseness" that allows you to reshape and recombine things super quickly

They are not mutually exclusive though. You can master English and other languages as well.