20 Words from Around the World With No Single-word English Equivalent

http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/20-awesomely-untranslatable-words-from-around-the-world/

by shrikant • 16 years ago

38 40 16 years ago

hassy• 16 years ago

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.

tomjen3• 16 years ago

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.

8ren• 16 years ago

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

mirkules• 16 years ago

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"

DCoder2• 16 years ago

In Russian it's also called "mayak" (literally 'beacon').

metageek• 16 years ago

>Prozvonit's equivalent in English is a "bat-call."

Nice. In which country?

switch007• 16 years ago

Never heard this in the UK. I've only ever heard "prank."

byrneseyeview• 16 years ago

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

Jun82• 16 years ago

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.

_b8r03• 16 years ago

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.

eru5• 16 years ago

And it has nice grammar. My manager once put together a formal grammar for _all_ the things you can do to verbs. It fit on one sheet of paper.

Jun82• 16 years ago

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.

ced• 16 years ago

English undoubtedly is the world's richest language in the sense of having the largest vocabulary.

Citation needed.

I have, however, found this:

Is it true that English has the most words of any language?

This question is practically impossible to answer, for the reasons explained in the answer to How many words are there in the English language? However, it seems quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/94

Also interesting, from Wikipedia:

The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions.

A Chinese character is a bit like a prefix/suffix in English. Most words are made of two characters. I would guess that "370,000 definitions" means there are 370,000 different words. But the phrasing is a bit strange.

roel_v• 16 years ago

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 :)

lkozma• 16 years ago

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 :)

btilly• 16 years ago

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.

Cushman• 16 years ago

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.

igravious2• 16 years ago

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.

thomas11• 16 years ago

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."

frossie• 16 years ago

Yet there are words in English that don't have one word equivalents in many other languages - eg. "home" (as opposed to "my house")

While I don't think it tells you much about linguistics, I do think these kind of games give you a little cultural glimpse.

thalur• 16 years ago

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

anonymous246• 16 years ago

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

arethuza• 16 years ago

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

bpm140• 16 years ago

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

defen• 16 years ago

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.

eru5• 16 years ago

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

16s• 16 years ago

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

proemeth• 16 years ago

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

diego_moita• 16 years ago

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..."

ph0rque• 16 years ago

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.

joelburget• 16 years ago

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

eru5• 16 years ago

`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.

DCoder2• 16 years ago

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

20 Words from Around the World With No Single-word English Equivalent

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