Linguist: Each language has a word that captures a concept

BTGmoderatorRO wrote:Linguist: Each language has a word that captures a concept or emotional state in a way that no other language does. To capture such a breadth of expression, an artificial language should be created that contains words corresponding to all the different concepts and emotional states captured by the world's languages. That is not to say that such a language would contain as many words as there are in all the world's languages. Rather, only for those words that have no corresponding word in another language. While such a plan is hugely ambitious, the resulting language would be more thorough than any existing language.

The conclusion drawn above depends on which of the following assumptions?

A) Extinct languages do not offer up words that capture concepts and emotional states in ways that fundamentally differ from those of existing languages.
B) Many languages have words that virtually overlap in the meaning they convey.
C) Each year hundreds of the world's languages go extinct, once there are no longer any native speakers remaining.
D) It is possible for one person to learn all of the world's existing languages.
E) The range of concepts and emotional states is the only indication of a language's thoroughness.
OA is e
what is wrong with option B in this question?

This is an Assumption question. As I mentioned previously, the best way to approach assumption questions is to use the 'Negation Strategy' - i.e., negate the options and the negation of the correct assumption would negate/destroy the conclusion.

One of the fundamental approaches to any CR question should be to identify the jumps in the line of reasoning made by the author. One of the good ways to do this is to do a quick word-match between the premises and the conclusion and notice how the premise(s) differs from the conclusion. In this question, the premise and the conclusion differ in the following way:

The premise talks about 'an artificial language should be created that contains words corresponding to all the different concepts and emotional states captured by the world's languages'

The conclusion talks about 'the resulting language would be more thorough than any existing language'

The crucial jump in the line of reasoning, or the assumption, made by the author is "different concepts and emotional states captured = more thorough". This is what option E says, and hence is the correct assumption.

Let us quickly negate option B - Many languages do not have words that virtually overlap in the meaning they convey - Well, the purpose of this artificial language is to capture the words that do not have a corresponding word in another language (as per sentence 4). Therefore, even if the negation of option B is true, it doesn't invalidate the conclusion that the resulting language would be more thorough than any existing language. Hence, option B is INCORRECT.

Please let me know in case anything doesn't make sense.