I speak a couple languages and also noticed imprecision in each of them. What is interesting is where in the languages the imprecision occurs. It often seems to be a reflection of cultural values. In some Asian languages there is great importance placed on age-based social status. So the English pronouns he/she are replaced by pronouns that reflect age rather than gender. So on the one hand they are less precise because they don't indicate gender but more precise because they indicate age. And the titles for family members have many gradations. For example the English word "uncle" - there are different words for father's older brother, father's younger brother, mother's older brother, mother's younger brother.
I don't speak as many languages as you (chapeau btw.) but I do think there are differences in precision between languages. By far the most imprecise language I know, and I suspect this is by design (politeness), is Japanese. It basically has no subject and most of what we'd call grammar is derived from context. I suspect this language must be amazing for poetry, but I'm not good enough to be able to tell.
The most precise language I know is German, although this is also my native tongue, so I could be biased here. German has most of the grammar of Latin (4 out of 5 cases) and together with always distinct subjects (no you singular/you plural confusion) and compound words (need a new word? go wild!) it allows for very succinct communication. Great for technical specs, essays etc. Describing feelings can get tough, on the other hand - anything that you can't define exactly tends to sound lazy. That's where the Romance languages with their Subjunctive have the upper hand...
So my point is, IMO there are some profound differences in what languages are good at. All of them are able to communicate any piece of information, but how natural it will sound, depends on the language. Just like programming languages are usually Turing complete, yet (so far) have their strenghts and weaknesses depending on the field of application.
>By far the most imprecise language I know, and I suspect this is by design (politeness), is Japanese. It basically has no subject and most of what we'd call grammar is derived from context.
First, the obligatory, any claim that a particular cultural element causes a particular language feature needs tremendous evidence; languages evolve on their own.
Second, Japanese has very explicit subjects, they are what comes before the は or が particle. By convention, stating the subject in a sentence is optional and generally omitted if it could be understood from context. You could argue that this is an imprecision, but if you need the precision for something, then just state the subject. There is only a 1 syllable overhead for doing so (beyond the syllables in the subject itself). From a technical (read linguistic) standpoint you could argue that what is marked by は and が is not really "subjects", but something else ("topics"), which is technically correct[0]. One could also argue that Japanese does not have adjectives, which is also technically correct, but both of these say more about how the field of linguistics chooses to model and define terms than about Japanese itself.
Third, Japanese has a very well defined grammar. Unlike English, it is largely not based on word order, but by particles that follow phrases to indicate what part of speech said phrase is (and yes, in my experience, this is very useful for poetry). Admittedly, colloquial Japanese sometimes omits these particles, but when they do so the sentences are arranged in very standard forms turning it into a word order based grammer.
[0] Mostly. Sometimes は and が really do mark the subject.
no it isn't and no it doesn't. All natural languages carry a large portion of ambiguity, to the extend that Steven Pinker even count ambiguity as a defining factor of natural language!
You raise an interesting question as to whether the language can be separated from the culture. I'd wager that there's a ton of imprecision in Asian languages due to culture where a lot of communication is unspoken and relies on context. Korean-Canadian working as a manager in China and finding that I don't know how to communicate with my team even after 1.5 years on the job. Part of it is that I suck at being a manager, but part of it is that my team expects me to be able to read their minds. Chinese people tell me that the normal thing is to say something and mean something else.
If you separate language room the goal of communication and the context of culture, it's easy to analyze language differences the way you would analyze the difference between Python and Swift. But that analysis may not be so useful or applicable in day-to-day life.
What is your point exactly? How does that joke in anyway counter the point that ambiguity is a prominent feature in all languages? do you honestly believe that because this joke doesn't translate, there can't possibly exist jokes based on double entendre or other ambiguities in the target language?
Chinese is more full of double (or more) meanings than any other language I've studied. Chinese literature and poetry are famous for playing on multiple meanings of a single character or sound.
Even in my one year of Chinese, I learned a great appreciation for the ridiculous puns that can be made in Chinese. It's also remarkably concise. I think most computer programmers, if exposed to Chinese, would really admire its clarity and simplicity. It's like the Lisp of natural languages.
Egad, no! English is like Perl. It looks strange, but it's actually pretty simple and flexible, despite the ideas held in place with duct tape. Right->{}?
C++ is absurdly obtuse and complicated, for no good reason. It's not simple or flexible at all. If it were a natural language, it would be dead already. Native speakers would have been conquered by another people who could actually understand each other relatively unambiguously. Like English speakers.
Is ambiguity in language always a bad thing? William Empson wrote in Seven Type of Ambiguity that "The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry", and he seemed to know a thing or two.
English is one of the few languages you can read a million books, known every single grammar rule, and still sound like a complete idiot when speaking a word to somebody else (even if you're right)
This leads to many examples of miscommunication that take so longer to unravel.