
20 Words from Around the World With No Single-word English Equivalent - shrikant
http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/20-awesomely-untranslatable-words-from-around-the-world/
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Cushman
Cute, but linguistically it doesn't mean as much as it claims. English happens
to be an isolating analytic language— meaning that words tend to be made from
a small number of individual units of meaning (morphemes), with more complex
meaning being conveyed by the use of additional words.

All of those languages listed (that I know of) are what are called synthetic
languages, meaning they tend to use words made up of many (in the case of
polysynthetic languages, very many) morphemes. Thus concepts that are
expressed in an isolating language using several words — happy at his
suffering, so bad it's good, mid-life crisis, to use a few examples from the
article — might be expressed in a synthetic language with a single "word", but
which is still composed of several meaningful morphemes.

Basically, "words" in these languages don't fulfill the same function as words
in English, so the comparison isn't really valid, and the fact that there
isn't any single-word English equivalent isn't very interesting. Not to say
some of those aren't nice words, of course.

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igravious
This I noticed right away but I didn't know the linguistic terms for it.
(Isn't agglutination something to do with this by the way?) For instance the
very famous schadenfreude that everybody has come across at one point or
another and arguably has been imported into English at this stage (and so _is_
an English word as such) has two distinct words - schade meaning pity (i
think) and freude meaning joy (i think). This example is silly because it is
allowable and possible to compose reallylongwords in german from shorter words
but not in English. What would be neat is if there were a single
undecomposable word in German that has no ready, handy English cognate.

I wonder how many "words" on this list or not morphologically discrete.

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thomas11
German here. "Schaden" in this case means harm or damage or misfortune (which
causes someone else's joy). It can mean pity in other contexts, though, as in
"that's a pity".

A nice example of an undecomposable word in German that has no ready, handy
English cognate is Gemütlichkeit. From Wikipedia: "Its closest equivalent is
the word "coziness"; however, [...] Gemütlichkeit connotes the notion of
belonging, social acceptance, cheerfulness, the absence of anything hectic and
the opportunity to spend quality time."

~~~
igravious
Thanks for that clarification. I was going by my rusty German and Google
translate :)

Gemütlichkeit sounds like a great word. So German and grand. An interesting
word on the list from the page of the article is Dépaysement ... meaning "The
feeling that comes from not being in one’s home country" which if you squint
closely is un-country-ness in English which indeed sounds odd. But we do we
the word _discplacement_ which could be overloaded with this typically gallic
connotation.

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theclay
How do we distinguish Dépaysement from alienated?

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Jun8
First, the "there are 250K words in English" statement is kind of wrong, it's
probably much higher, e.g. OED states on their web page
(<http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/93>) that "If distinct senses were
counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million."
English undoubtedly is the world's richest language in the sense of having the
largest vocabulary.

As for the "they have a word for it and we don't" thing: The examples given
are delightful, also see the book "They Have a Word for It" for other
interesting examples. I can give more examples from my native language,
"kismet" "ayip" that are untranslatable. But look at that first word, _kismet_
: you've probably seen it used, albeit rarely, in magazines, etc. (putting
aside the wireless sniffer, of course, of that name). _This_ is the power of
English, it voracious appetite for word adoption.

Ask yourself this: How many of those language listed in the article have a
thesaurus, and is they have how thick it would be. Many languages are
lexically shallow, i.e. there is usually one word for many concepts, with few
synonym sets.

~~~
iuguy
Kismet: Destiny

Ayip: Shameful

There are worse Turkish concepts to choose to translate (the many alterations
of Gule Gule that can be added for one, I've never been able to get my head
around the construct) and the mis suffix (to have experienced something
indirectly or via another person is probably the easiest way to put it).

Having said that, Turkish can be extremely beautiful as a language,
particularly for conveying emotion, beauty or craftiness.

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Jun8
Yep, these are the standard definitions that would be found in a Turkish-
English dictionary, but I don't think they cover the nuances of these words.
For example, "destiny" is very well represented by "kader", whereas "kismet"
seems to have a hint of luck, etc involved. It has a certain pagan feeling to
it, I think.

That being said, Turkish is a good example of a language that suffers from a
relative synonym deficiency. When I was working on linguistic steganography,
where a message can be embedded into text by replacing words with their
synonyms, I discussed applying same concepts to Turkish with a Turkish
professor (Bulent Sankur). They complained that this approach is general does
not work because there aren't a multitude of synonyms for may words, as in
English.

The reason for this is partly the brutal pruning of many Arabic-Farsi synonyms
during the Language Revolution and its aftermath that were common at the time
(1930s) to create a "pure" Turkish.

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iuguy
That's interesting. To me (being a fairly basic Turkish speaker but nowhere
near fluent) the difference between Kader and Kismet is that Kader is stuff
that's meant to happen in a strictly secular sense (e.g. a man goes to jail
because he committed a murder, this I would view as kader although perhaps
incorrectly) whereas kismet is more spectacular, indeed by the will of god for
those that believe in such things, such as bumping into a long lost lover on
the other side of the world by chance, rekindling a relationship and getting
back together - that to me is definitely kismet. I've yet to see a decent
romantic story that features kader :)

I think the pruning of Ottoman from modern Turkish is a double-edged sword. On
the one hand it makes learning basic Turkish incredibly straightforward. It
took me two weeks to get to a level of proficiency similar to that of a 7 or 8
year old with my mother in-law. It's almost deceptively easy, because when you
start talking to Turks in the real world a lot of the Ottoman loan-terms never
really disappeared.

Also I've noticed while I can talk to my mother and father in-law, I have real
trouble understanding my anane, who almost speaks an entirely different
language.

The other thing I've noticed (in Istanbul at least), is the anglicisation of
Turkish. I remember when computers were 'knowledge desks' (Bilgisayarlar), not
'laptops' or 'pee-sees'. I've noticed this particularly with technology, but
even just overhearing conversations in taksim cafes it seems that young Turks
are more likely to use English words in general conversation.

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hassy
An example going the other way: Russian does not have an equivalent to
"artist". There are words specifically for "painter", "singer" etc, but
nothing generic. The closest is "творец" (tvorets) but it's closer to
"creator" and calling yourself a "tvorets" would be very very pretentious,
unlike calling yourself an artist.

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tomjen3
It would properly be better if we removed the word from English too -- Creator
does more accurately describe what one does, and nobody would say "you can't
judge a creation" the way they claim art can't be judged.

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byrneseyeview
My favorite is the Russian word _Pochemuchka_ , which means "One who asks lots
of questions." The literal translation is more like "Little Why-er".

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lkozma
Take any agglutinative language (Hungarian, Finnish, etc.) or one with
propensity for constructing words by gluing other words together (German) and
you will find thousands of "words" that have no single word English
equivalent.

Some of the words from the list are interesting, but overall this is quite
superficial, "word" is not a building block in the exact same way in all
languages. Besides, some items are not words but expressions, one is a slang
term related to mobile phones, that probably has equivalents in most
languages, a large part of the words refer to some sort of melancholy or
nostalgia. Not exactly that? Well, I'm sure the word "melancholy" already
means something different for any two persons, let alone speakers of different
languages.

That being said, I always have trouble explaining "kitsch" in English (see the
M. Kundera link :) and always have trouble understanding "serendipity" in
languages other than English :)

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btilly
_one is a slang term related to mobile phones, that probably has equivalents
in most languages_

It has no equivalent in American English. That may be because in the USA you
pay for time spent on the cell phone, whether you initiated the call or not,
so that behavior doesn't exist.

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eru
`Doch' is close to my favourite. It's mainly used in German to say disagree
with a negative question, but can also be added to normal sentences for
emphasis.

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arethuza
A Scot here - I've never heard "tartle" being used.

Much more frequently used is _dreich_ \- A combination of dull, overcast,
drizzly, cold, misty and miserable

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8ren
9\. _prozvonit_ is to _prank_ , in slang I've heard & used here in Australia.

bonus: _tingo_ \- "to borrow things from a friend's house, one by one, until
there is nothing left" in Pascuense language of Easter Island
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Jacot_de_Boinod#Career>

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mirkules
Prozvonit's equivalent in English is a "bat-call." A bat-call can also be used
to notify the other person of something (not necessarily to prompt a call
back). As in, "When I get to your house, come outside when I give you a bat-
call"

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metageek
> _Prozvonit's equivalent in English is a "bat-call."_

Nice. In which country?

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roel_v
I came here to post the Dutch word 'gezellig' but luckily I read the article
first and discovered that apparently the Danish have a cousin word,
'Hyggelig', that was included in the list :)

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DCoder
Seems relevant:

The Korean concept of _Han_ , as explained by The West Wing: "There is no
literal English translation. It's a state of mind. Of soul, really. A sadness.
A sadness so deep no tears will come. And yet still there's hope."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_%28cultural%29>

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ph0rque
Another Russian word is _rodina_ (родина) which very superficially translates
to homeland, but really means the place where you feel at home. I think there
are some cultural reasons why American English doesn't have this word:
basically, no need for it.

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defen
Any Russian speakers here? Is _sehnsucht_ an adequate translation of _toska_?
It's not really an English word but I think it's sufficiently well known due
to the work of C.S. Lewis.

~~~
eru
From the description of toska in the article, Sehnsucht may be right. (I speak
German and almost no Russian.)

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bpm140
Man, I tartled something fierce last week at a dinner party I threw in NYC.
Thank god I finally have a word for it.

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thalur
It's a shame number 17 is four words, not one. Otherwise, some interesting
words.

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proemeth
Toska: looks like Melancholy Saudade: how is that different from mourning?

~~~
diego_moita
Mourning is more like an act, a ceremony of showing sadness. Saudade is the
little pain that lingers on long after the mourning; the settlement of
mourning that never heals. As brazilian singer Chico Buarque says "Saudade is
like a sting on a limb I lost long ago" or "Saudade is the boat that makes an
arc and can't reach the harbour". In saudade there's a constant questioning of
"what could it have been only if..."

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joelburget
If we're being picky, "l’appel du vide" is actually 4 words.

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16s
Some words ought to be universal. Shark would be a good one.

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anonymous246
I suggest that English steal 'tartle' and 'prozvonit'.

