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Japanese Words That Don't Exist in English
- 11thEarlOfMar 10y agoI really like: "Kintsukuroi": the art of repairing pottery with gold or silver joining the pieces and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken. Westerners have the Nietzsche'esque notion of 'what does not kill you makes you stronger'. But "Kintsukuroi" is more like 'what does not destroy you makes you more beautiful.' It's as if the effort and care taken to repair the item confers a sense of heightened value on it.
- Ayaz 10y agoIt is beautiful, to say the least.
- pdonis 10y agoI find it interesting that the article calls these words "untranslatable" but then proceeds to translate them. Yes, there are no single words in English that have the exact meanings of the single words in Japanese, but "untranslatable" gives the impression of not being able to convey the meaning in English even with multiple words--but that's exactly what the article does.
- 8note 10y agoThey might have failed miserably at translating these words
- jessriedel 10y agoExcept that the very first paragraph makes it clear that the author means "doesn't have a single-word translation".
- mcphage 10y agoOf course, not all of these are single words in Japanese, either—"mononoaware" is usually given as 3: "mono no aware".
- zhemao 10y agoI think 8note means that, unless one speaks Japanese, the multi-word translations given in the article might be incorrect and we wouldn't know any better.
- jessriedel 10y agoI understand that. But we shouldn't think that's more likely to be true here than any other article translating Japanese because the phrases easily satisfy the author's definition of "untranslatable", and there's not really a reason to think that these terms are actually beyond the ability to translate given the ability to use many words.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dustmop 10y agoIf only there were a single word that could convey "difficult to translate without using more than one word", alas the closest we have is "untranslatable".
- simonh 10y agoI think it's a useful warning signal that any attempted translation is provisional, has limited scope and can't be relied on. A less absolute word or phrase might give the impression that a straightforward translation is possible, but 'untranslatable' is a stark warning.
- z2 10y agoFurthermore, what is a single word anyway? Many alphabet based languages make this easy with spaces, but the multiple characters of Chinese and kana make it easy to stack things without ever using a space to break it into distinct parts. So of course Japanese is capable of generating really long and therefore unique "words".
- r-w 10y agoSame with German. But even there, there are connotations surrounding those compound words that are lost in translation to English.
- boondaburrah 10y agoThe thing with "untranslatable" words is that their perfectly translatable, but the connotations surrounding them are completely different. What untranslatable then means in this context is that the listener of the translated version will /not/ understand the same meaning as someone listening to the non-translated version. For instance, while the literal translation of shouganai is "it can't be helped," I'll translate it as "shit happens" in one situation, or "that's bureaucracy for you" (among other things) in another, depending on context. There simply isn't a reliable equivalent. Also, imagine a scene (one that occurs every day at the end of my restaurant shift) where everyone is saying "otsukare" to each other. How should I translate that? Should I just have people yelling "TIRED" to the room? I'd have translated the word 'correctly' but not actually reflected the general feeling of "wow, we did it bro. Good job" I'm currently learning Japanese. As I've learned these 'untranslatable words' of course I learned them through dictionaries and English explanations. As I saw them used and used them myself, though, they came to mean something different. I had to develop a new concept to compile them to, as it were. Now I find them difficult to translate back to English, and instead they have become new words in my vocabulary. It's why pigeon languages happen. (you should see the English spoken in the English-speaking office I worked at. It's stolen many Japanese words)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- aji 10y agoThis makes me wonder what English words are unique to English, kind of like "breakfast" (in the context of a Burmese tribe) mentioned at the top of the article. There's gotta be a few, right?
- ubersync 10y agoTwerking.
- oneloop 10y agoIf you accept "modern" words like twerking,I would bet that English is the language with the biggest number of untranslatable words, for the simple reason that nowadays most culture is first produced in English.
- germanier 10y agoThere is plenty of (pop-)culture produced in other languages. It's just people not speaking those languages not noticing most.
- oneloop 10y agoThere's a couple of orders of magnitude more culture being produced English than any other language (I speak three other languages)
- germanier 10y agoI wouldn't be so sure that there is less produced in Mandarin than in English. Spanish and Arabic might be behind but definitely not an order of magnitude. Also don't forget things like the massive film industry producing in Hindi. Also, you original claim was that English produces more "culture" than all other languages combined which is definitely wrong. Not even one out of seven speaks English. Are you really claiming that English-speakers have on average more than six times the cultural output than non-English-speakers? (I also don't know what your definition "produced culture" is as life is not a game of Civilization, but that's besides the point.)
- est 10y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective
- Aelinsaar 10y agoNothing is quite as beautiful and poetic as the German, 'Backpfeifengesicht', meaning sort of "A face that wants to be slapped".
- 11thEarlOfMar 10y agoOr the marginally less snarky 'Gemütlichkeit': A space or state of warmth, friendliness, and good cheer. Other qualities include coziness, peace of mind, belonging, well being, and social acceptance. The term is most commonly associated with the tenor of a German beer garden. Now. Use it in a sentence.
- rasur 10y agoKannst du meine Gemütlichkeit nicht stören, bitte. (or something... ;) )
- misterS 10y agoProbier's mal mit Gemütlichkeit! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_EWWyJfgPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_EWWyJfgPc No idea what the song is in English, though :) Edit: got it, "Bare Necessities": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ogQ0uge06o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ogQ0uge06o
- rasur 10y agoHa, fantastic, thanks!
- Aelinsaar 10y agoI love that word! That, and the contrast between 'Gemeinschaft' and 'Gesellschaft'.
- strictfp 10y agoConvivial.
- mercer 10y ago
- bitwize 10y agoI like these: Murahachibu: shunning, public ostracism. Originally meant being excluded from eight (out of ten) aspects of village life. The two jobs which a person under murahachibu were still allowed to perform were firefighting and undertaking, considered the meanest, dirtiest, and least desirable jobs. Handling corpses was thought to make a person "unclean", and persons who did so were isolated to the slummiest village districts called buraku; from these are descended the burakumin, who (much like blacks in the USA) have been historically an oppressed underclass and yet have contributed much to the modern street culture of Japan. Modern murahachibu is practiced in a less severe form: if you fail to kiss the right asses and scratch the right backs in your professional or social life, you will find yourself without help when you most need help. Daikon ashi: thick legs (on a woman). A daikon is, of course, a long thick radish used in Japanese cooking. It turns out that Japanese women are at least as self-conscious about not having a "thigh gap" as are Western women. Tachiyomi: to "read standing up". When you're in a bookshop and you pick a book off the shelf and start reading it right in the shop. Manga fans love to do this; bookshop owners will sometimes throw people out for doing it. Brings back memories of being an early teen and heading straight for the magazine racks to read ALL THE GAMING MAGAZINES while my mother did the shopping.
- 2muchcoffeeman 10y agoEnglish probably borrows from other languages more than any other. What's stopping us from just stealing these words? In Singapore for example, people will often just drop in a Malay or Cantonese word.
- torgoguys 10y agoNothing. A few of those are already on their way to being borrowed. I've read "kintsugi" (slightly different spelling than the article) in a very much in English legal brief and heard at least one other (wabi-sabi) in another context, again used as if it were part of English. If they're useful, they may just get assimilated.
- tjl 10y agoBorrowing words is pretty common. I went on an exchange to a small town in Québec when I was in high school. They borrowed English words to use in French. The only thing is that their use wasn't quite the same as English. For example, I was asked if a girl who was a good friend of mine was my "chum". I said yes, not knowing that they use it to mean girlfriend/boyfriend. Good examples for English borrowing words are "nirvana" and "dharma". Both are hard to translate their meaning into English so we just go with the word itself.
- sdrothrock 10y agoThere probably hasn't been a pressing specific need in English for those specific words; English has definitely borrowed a number of Japanese words, some of which are very common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Japanese_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Japan... For example, something like 木枯らし (kogarashi, the first wind of winter) is extremely specific and must have been important at some point in Japanese culture, but there isn't any real need for it in English any more than there is for "zephyr" (a gentle wind from the West). Some of these do have English equivalents, like しょうがない, which is really two words and a particle. Most people I know who speak English would just say "oh well" in a resigned tone or, more casually, "shit happens."
- kohsuke 10y agoThere's one word that I expected to be in the list but it isn't, which is もったいない (mottai nai) It describes the situation where something/someone that is still of some use is left unused and wasted, such as leaving food on the table or wasting somebody's talent. I'm a Japanese who's been living in the US for more than a decade, and I always thought this one word represents what's missing in American culture the most.
- mcphage 10y agoThat sounds like it's most equivalent to "squadered": http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/squander http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/squander
- justifier 10y agojapanese and german share a lexical pattern the more syllables in a word then the fewer definitions it has it is interesting to me that the author chose these 'types' of words to highlight their highly specialised nature makes them far more translatable than the Japanese words i find most beautiful my favourite japanese word is 間,ma (o) it is difficult to translate because it simultaneously carries multiple meanings: "gap", "space", "pause" or "the space between two structural parts"(i); it can refer to any existence of negatives space, be it temporal, physical or metaphysical the kanji is a combination of the characters for: gate(ii) and sun(iii); two of the most important symbols in japanese iconography, and the question of whether the sun is setting or rising between the gate is up to interpretation as well (o) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%96%93 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%96%93 (i) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_(negative_space) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_(negative_space) (ii) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%96%80 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%96%80 (iii) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5
- jcranmer 10y agoPolysemy is fairly common in languages. In my French-English dictionary, working out how to translate the simple word "get" takes up over two pages--and most of that is not dealing with the English proclivity for coining idiomatic verb phrases (e.g., "to put up" is completely different from any connotation of "to put" with the preposition "up"). The verbs "go", "set", and "put" also have impressively long definition lists if you consider these derivative verb phrases.
- justifier 10y agoSure, nearly every dictionary entry lists multiple definitions Partially why I used the word 'multiple meanings' stead 'multiple defintions' ma's charm is in its single definition: negative space; having its own many meanings: temporal, physical,metaphysical Similarly latin's animus(o):mind, soul,conciousness,heart; multiple meanings all trying to define a single concept Look at a first kiss In the moments before a kiss ma is present temporally as the negative space between the decision to act and the action, physically as the material distance between sets of lips, and metaphysically as the distance between the animus of the individuals about to experience a post first kiss existence (o) https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/animus https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/animus
- partycoder 10y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXI1GHtqDEU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXI1GHtqDEU
- rajahafify 10y agoKomorebi is called God's Ray in video game sphere.
- shawnps 10y agoCertainly the first time I've seen "otsukaresama" described as "beautiful". It's like something you say to your coworkers when you pass them in the hallway.
- djsumdog 10y agoHmm...my adblock doesn't work on that site. There's an ad between each word. It actually made me more enraged. It's a listy, click bait, rubbish, bullshit article.
- Synaesthesia 10y agoThe Japanese word "mu" can be translated as "I reject the premise of your question" - a word which would be very useful in English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)
- sdrothrock 10y agoIt's not really a word; it's a prefix or an abbreviation. Nobody would ever say "mu" alone, let alone to mean "I reject the premise of your question" in conversation, even if it were culturally acceptable.
- roel_v 10y agoWell it's used as a word in the mu koan. Might be archaic and not used in modern Chinese or Japanese, I don't know, but for 'mu' as the prefix we have (as far as I understand, which is admittedly not particularly deep) 'not'. 'Mu' as in 'your question is based on faulty premises' is the more useful form for Westerners, I'd argue.
- sdrothrock 10y agoThe koan in question is Chinese, not Japanese; Japanese allows for the reading of old Chinese with Japanese readings, but Japanese people won't understand it without specific knowledge of how to read Japanized Chinese, so it's in a really weird place in general -- it's definitely not something I'd call a "Japanese word," though.
- teekert 10y agoWhy is it impossible to select words from that article? (FF current)
- Grue3 10y agoWell, at least half of Japanese words are borrowed either from English or from Chinese, so it works in reverse as well. Here's one that nobody mentioned yet: Tsundoku - when you buy new books but end up never reading them