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20 Words from Around the World With No Single-word English Equivalent
- hassy 16y agoAn 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 16y agoIt 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.
- LInuxFedora 16y agoEnglish is a pretty boring language ?
- 8ren 16y ago9. 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Jacot_de_Boinod#Career
- mirkules 16y agoProzvonit'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"
- byrneseyeview 16y agoMy favorite is the Russian word Pochemuchka, which means "One who asks lots of questions." The literal translation is more like "Little Why-er".
- Jun8 16y agoFirst, 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 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 16y agoKismet: 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.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- eru 16y agoAnd 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.
- iuguy 16y agoIt is impressive, pretty much everything is regular, you can pick up enough to get started in about an hour. I find Turkish almost like the python of spoken languages.
- roel_v 16y agoI 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 16y agoTake 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 16y agoone 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 16y agoCute, 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.
- igravious 16y agoThis 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 16y agoGerman 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."
- thalur 16y agoIt's a shame number 17 is four words, not one. Otherwise, some interesting words.
- anonymous246 16y agoI suggest that English steal 'tartle' and 'prozvonit'.
- arethuza 16y agoA 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
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- bpm140 16y agoMan, I tartled something fierce last week at a dinner party I threw in NYC. Thank god I finally have a word for it.
- defen 16y agoAny 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 16y agoFrom the description of toska in the article, Sehnsucht may be right. (I speak German and almost no Russian.)
- 16s 16y agoSome words ought to be universal. Shark would be a good one.
- proemeth 16y agoToska: looks like Melancholy Saudade: how is that different from mourning?
- diego_moita 16y agoMourning 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 16y agoAnother 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 16y agoIf we're being picky, "l’appel du vide" is actually 4 words.
- eru 16y 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.
- DCoder 16y agoSeems 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_%28cultural%29