I’ve been asked this question in the past so I thought I’d compose a quick post to share my thoughts. After all, the question is a very good one because philosophy, dealing with lofty truths that can change the course of history, needs to operate within the right medium. Accuracy, communicability, flexibility – these are all important traits that one needs in a language for it to lend itself to good and influential philosophy.
Undoubtedly, there are some languages out there that definitely do not partner well with philosophy. For example, I once learnt the basics of a local African language (I was doing some volunteer work in central Africa) that couldn’t cope well with abstraction. Abstraction and philosophy go hand in hand so such languages are definitely not the way to go.
With respect to the more “advanced” languages, I would say that a lot rests on the precision that you can extract from a language. Precision and philosophy also go hand in hand. I know that German is very good in this respect because you can combine words easily to make new meanings and in this way can be more precise with the way you use them to describe highly abstract concepts. Mandarin Chinese and Japanese I hear are similar in this respect, too (although I have absolutely no experience with Eastern languages). German also has a hardness to it that lends itself to precision. I don’t speak German fluently but I speak fluent Polish. This language is not of the same family as German but it has a similar hardness to it and I can tell you that the precision I can extract from it makes it superior to English in this respect.
A lot also depends on the philosophy that you are describing/using. Some philosophies rely more heavily on precision than others. For example, those founded on heavy metaphysics like Thomism. Some philosophies, however, are more “poetic” in nature like phenomenology (I’m generalising a bit here) so languages like English can “cope” better with these. Also, the original language of written texts is important, too, in this respect. Knowing them can be extremely beneficial because things always get lost in translation. So, for example, Latin and Greek have been instrumental for Western Philosophy so knowing them could go a long way (cf. Heidegger).
Ultimately, though, in my humble opinion, I think it’s fair to say that precision is what you need. So, the languages that can provide you with that will be the superior ones. So, I’m thinking here Polish, German, and the like.
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