This is nonsense. It's like saying "sun" is the most succinct word, meaning "Giant ball of fusing plasma situated approximately 149 million km from earth that acts as the centre of the solar system and around which the earth orbits". Of course, if you have no word for a concept, you need to describe it, but all words are like that. Try translating "quantum electrodynamics" into the Yaghan language. In practice what happens is the foreign word gets adopted to represent the concept.
I think the point here is that this word can be understood by a speaker of that language who didnt't know it prior to hearing it. It is succinct in that it is a description of itself, in a single word.
That's a fun problem, here's a half scientific way to solve it: given a dictionary for every pair of languages, the "most succinct word" is the one with the longest definition in other languages.
Technical terms like "quantum electrodynamics" are usually imported with minimal changes, and if you ignore foreign words you'll see a lot of languages more or less disappear (cough english cough). My guess is that the most succinct words by this definition would be very specific to a culture, like "fourth amendment" or "Purim Torah".
It's also quite anglocentric, I'm sure it would be quite difficult to translate the word "sext" into latin or navajo and would also result in a long, complicated explanation.
The point is not the linguistics. It's not about whether the "Guinness Book of World Records" has the correct choice, or even is a reliable authority on such matters.
The point is that it's a beautiful concept and this language found it important enough to have a single word for it that is used enough to be written down and shared.
The title is about it being the "most succinct word" and that claim is in the first sentence of the wikipedia article. I think it's hard to argue that the point here is just the concept and language.
It seems from morphology section that it is an agglutinative language. This is a norm in these, like Kugelschreiber (ball pen) is a norm in Deutsch. I wonder why there’s a wiki article for this particular word.
You are right regarding Yahgan being an agglutinative language and that words like 'mamihlapinatapai' is a result of that. But -- apologies for being nit-picky -- your example does not fit that category. The German word 'Kugelschreiber' is just a compound (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)).
The fact that compounds are typically written as a single word, as opposed to English, does not make German an agglutinative language; that is mostly a merely orthographic convention. German is considered a fusional (or inflected) language.
Indeed, Yaghan is highly agglutinative: e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahgan_language#Verbs. Most of the languages in that region are. (In fact, most languages in the whole of the Americas are, with the notable exception of the Oto–Manguean family. Europe is atypical in having few highly agglutinative languages.)
The second interpretation (romantic) given on the page doesn't match the original; even with a creative license applied the original intention is not present.
Having experienced that moment on many occasions I would say the various interpretive sentences are indeed describing a singular class of experience, one that is sometimes romantic but that also happens in non-romantic contexts.
Cheating! Their language has larger composite words. By that measure some languages that turn a sentence into a word, all of their 'words' are 'succinct'
There are some words in Scots Gaelic that describe a particular quantity of a mouthful of whisky, but they don't mean a lot without context.
There are other Gaelic words for different types of rain, but only one of them - "uisge", which just means water - is printable, the rest being varying degrees of quite rude.
"most difficult to translate" always rubs me the wrong way. It's as bad as "impossible to translate". It atrributes some mysticism, some alien property way of thinking to people who speak another language. They are just like you and me in almost every imaginable way.
>people who speak another language. They are just like you and me in almost every imaginable way.
And then the Orange fruit is introduced, and the language gains the word orange, and all those who speak that language begin to perceive color differently because now they have a word for a hue that they didn't previously have a word for, and that causes them to perceive that hue as a distinct color for the first time.
There is no mysticism in translation loss. A sentence has a meaning in a given cultural frame, and any attempt to transpose it in an other frame will face hard or even unachievable constraints.
Just like, if you don't have the background to understand an adhoc private joke, having later some full length explanation will not necessarily make you laugh as you might have if you had these information upstream. In case of translation, your lake of information might be the whole cultural frame that encompasses the language.
That’s like saying you can’t translate gohan/meshi as “rice” because of the deep cultural importance Japan places on rice. Sure, you can’t transmit to me the experience of growing up in a culture that has evolved for thousands of years with the ubiquitous presence of rice, you can’t download into my brain what it’s like to exist in a culture that is deeply and consciously reliant on rice, fine. But you absolutely can tell me the English word (or words) that points at the same thing they’re pointing at when they say their word (or words) for rice.
I think it’s more like trying to translate the word “petrichor” (that particular smell that occurs after a rain) into a language of a culture that has not experienced rain before. Without the context of rain, how can you translate the word for its smell? The translation is dependent on a something that is not present.
This word is akin to that, maybe not entirely the same, but in that culture clearly there was a context that enabled a word to be created for it.
That's full blown anti Benjamin Lee Whorf stance .. semi justified in the sense that Whorf went well past the end of the wharf.
There is a middle ground, people with other languages can and do think in other ways habitually.
“Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.”
~ Roman Jakobson
In the natural ebb and flow of day to day conversation gendered languages (French, German, etc) impel people to convey the gender of neighbours that they discuss, English doesn't.
if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about. [1]
The more extreme example is:
a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply “natural.”
In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects.
Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.”
That was interesting, I read 'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes' a few years back and it left me thinking about all kinds of things, linguistic/cultural etc.
It's a good book and the questions that lie between Everett and Chomsky are deep and still contentious.
I was born in the early 1960s and spent much of my childhood in areas around the Wallace Line in and out of Australia with a family running logistic support for Western scientists ( US, French, British, Dutch, et al ) all wanting a piece of the last remnants of the Noble Savage (heavy ironic quotes about an over abused notion of yore) .. I played a lot with kids my age that spoke what are now very nearly dead languages.
People are people in some deep universal sense, at the same time people with very different cultures and languages can and do think and see the world in very different ways.
The greatest difference that's perhaps most relevant today is that people who live directly from the land have a much better eye for the health and wellbeing of that land and a deeper sense of stewardship for the benefit of all and those to come.
Words that have some historical or cultural connotation can be difficult to translate because for people without the shared experience. I don't think that's mysticism, it's just the way shared understanding lets you pack more into a word. A word it never a self contained payload that conveys a whole concept, it's more like a dictionary key. And so to translate it for people that don't have the same underlying dictionary is way harder.
I remember learning that there exists (though I can't remember the actual phrase) a very short 2 or 3 character phrase in Chinese which was used to reprimand someone for doing harm to China's image by speaking negatively about it in front of a foreigner.
