I don't know the linguistic history of Sanskrit as compared to English, at least with regards to grammar. They definitely have some significant grammatical differences, for example in word cases. English has three cases (nominative, accusative, and genitive) whereas Sanskrit has eight (nominative, accusative, genitive, instrumental, dative, ablative, locative, and vocative), so that's more complex. On the other hand, this allows for increased flexibility in word order within a sentence, relative to English. So there are all kinds of structural differences like that.

For the purposes of this discussion about nuance of thought, I do agree about the English grammatical sense of "being" as being highly relevant. But other than that, I was thinking less about distinctions in grammar and more about vocabulary. Sanskrit's vocabulary, or more specifically the kinds of ideas it decides to give dedicated words to, is very different from English at a pretty fundamental level.

The word "viveka" for example expresses so much more subtle an idea than its closest English counterparts ("discernment" or "discrimination") can possibly capture. Same goes for "vairagya" ("detachment") which is again a much more nuanced thing than that simple English word alone can capture. Those nuances matter when you want to start using these words to express even more subtle concepts that don't have one-word English equivalents.

As another example, countless pages have been written about the Sanskrit words for the "three gunas": "tamas", "rajas", and "sattva". I could directly translate them into English triplets like ignorance, desire and equilibrium, or heavier terms and phrases involving ideas like oblivion, chaos and manifest truth... but the instant you start using these aspect-driven translations you lose the fact that the original term captures all of those aspects, allowing you to navigate between them as needed.

Those are the kinds of distinctions I'm talking about. English is a great language too (it's given us a lot), but when it comes to conversion from Sanskrit, a lot gets lost in translation.