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.

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

To his credit, the trailer does make it look like Kevin Hart is making a genuine attempt to play Roland from the game. Still a weird casting decision.

May I ask where this is from?