Could you express all your contemporary thoughts in Ancient Greek?

My proudest day in highschool French class was managing to write a pun in French - that makes no sense at all in English:

"The TV isn't working!"

"Yes, that's because I broke its legs"

First thing you have to do when making a comparison between languages based on word count is figure out what counts as a word and what doesn't. So, Modern English vs. Ancient Greek. English has a pretty massive lexicon, but Greek is more inflected. For English do we count the number of words the average person knows or the number of words in a dictionary? For Greek, does each inflected form of a word count as a separate word since it encapsulates a discrete meaning to a Greek speaker? You could probably hash this out, but that's an easy example. Next try word counts for Chinese and Greenlandic... Chinese (Mandarin) has almost zero inflection while Greenlandic is an agglutinative language... most of the lexicality of Greenlandic resides in affixes and you end up with big long words instead of sentences. So what's a good working definition of a "word" that is meaningful in all languages? And you haven't even gotten into how to count borrowed words, which easily make up the vast majority of the English lexicon.

What I'm getting at is that you can't really meaningfully compare languages by comparing a subset of similar features of the two languages. Different languages make use of various elements of language to varying degrees. Simplicity in one area is usually made up for through added complexity in another, and in the end it's a wash.

Humans speak different languages, but the features of our bodies that allow us to use language are all the same. You can assume that any natural language has equal fitness for the purpose of expressing the things humans need to express.

The important thing here is not that puns are often untranslatable, which is a consequence of what makes puns puns, but the fact that every language has puns. Even if a given pun is untranslatable, the concept of wordplay is easily understood by speakers of any language.

The Chomsky school indicates that all ideas should be translatable and that your thinking is not defined by the language you know. It may be directed or influenced by its nuances, which I think is what hazel is suggesting.

People still cling to the Whorfian thing though. How many times have you heard about all the words Eskimos have for snow?

I suppose I thought that because when you read, say, 'The Odyssey' or something, it doesn't seem concerned with some of the things you take for granted that a modern piece of literature would be concerned with. Like the minuitae of psychological states and things.

That perhaps says more about Homer (or us) than about the Greek language. I'm told (I really haven't read much) that the dramatists are the Greeks to go to for psychological probing. But still, just because the "psychological novel" is all the rage in our culture and wasn't in ancient Greece doesn't mean it couldn't be done. Harry Potter has been translated into Ancient Greek, after all.

Yeah, one distillation of the original question could be asking "is the strong interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis correct?" to which my answer is "no, but the weak interpretation seems to be supported by research into the matter."

People still cling to the Whorfian thing though.

Well, people still make extensive use of Freuduian metaphors, even thought there's no evidence to support our minds actually working that way. Similarly, people have ideas about how language works that are totally wrong but unlikely to cause problems in daily life. In fact, prescriptive English grammar is often hilariously wrong but socially necessary.

But compare this with English's loosey-goosey grammar which easily allows teh all sorts of shiznit to go down, dig?

Let me repeat that you can't meaningfully compare languages by comparing a subset of features of the two languages. You have to compare them in toto. You better believe Ancient Greek had slang, just as Modern English has plenty of rhetorically elegant turns of phrase.

Some things need no translation.