Our language limitation

One of the guests of the podcast I listened suggested Bahasa Indonesia as the best universal language. The grammar is simple, no gender, no conjugation, no tenses, etc. But other would argue that as a language Bahasa Indonesia is pretty poor in terms of number of words "...foreign translations of Indonesian novels tend to read better, while Indonesian translations of foreign novels sound ‘verbose and repetitive’..". I can see that as means of simple communication Bahasa Indonesia would be one attractive options. But again no one really speaks Bahasa Indonesia as taught for foreigner i.e. Standard Bahasa Indonesia (Bahasa Indonesia Baku).  In the old days we had a program in the National TV about Standard Bahasa Indonesia but such important program is no longer there (or is it ? my ignorance). I guess no one speak the standard language on the streets. 

I do speak other languages (local languages like Sundanese, Javanese, this language that I am using now, some French). I learned other languages to understand the grammar (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, German, Dutch. All using Duolingo). I see that some languages have complexities like gender, tenses, irregularities that makes it harder to learn. Not to mention the spelling. Of course native speakers would not see it the way I saw it. They had plenty of time to learn that language and the surely have the need to do so otherwise how could they understand and being understood.

Back to Bahasa Indonesia. As mentioned I am sure foreigners would easily be understood when they express basic things like (where, when, what, how many) but I guess when it comes to more complex expression Bahasa Indonesia might not have enough words. I thought German could be nominated as the champion (who would came up with  schadenfreude for example?)

But in general I would argue that all human languages are limited in one way or another. Saying like "A picture is worth a thousand words" for example would express such limitation. Feelings often could not expressed with words. Some ideas are even not supposed to be expressed in spoken words.

Let me quote this paragraph about the limitation of language: "...We cannot speak about things if the words don’t exist to allow us to do so. Sometimes, this makes us unaware of concepts others are able to discuss, other times, this limitation renders us incapable of speaking about things of which we are aware..".

How true