4 ms·
Mamihlapinatapai, Most Succinct Word
- politelemon 4y agoThe second interpretation (romantic) given on the page doesn't match the original; even with a creative license applied the original intention is not present.
- yodon 4y agoHaving 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.
- yodon 4y agoI want to live in a place where this happens often enough to need a word for it.
- xattt 4y ago“Middle-school dance”
- ocimbote 4y agoI would recommend to search for a setting that enables this to happen. Fortunately, it has nothing to do with a location.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoMy house? Nobody wants to do the hard stuff, and just look at one another expecting somebody else to do it. Usually me.
- vietthan 4y agoThe first definition sounds painful while the second (romantic) definition is very desirable.
- hgomersall 4y agoThis 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.
- teddyh 4y ago“Hill. Yes, that was it. But it is a hasty word for a thing that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped.” — Treebeard, The Lord of the Rings
- chongli 4y agoUniverse. All other ideas, all concepts, all physical things, all of it is contained within the universe. Clearly universe is the most succinct word.
- teddyh 4y agoMultiverse.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bmicraft 4y agoI 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.
- tambourine_man 4y agoIt's the concept that's interesting, more important than its succinctness, IMO.
- some_random 4y ago
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoCheating! Their language has larger composite words. By that measure some languages that turn a sentence into a word, all of their 'words' are 'succinct'
- xattt 4y agoDoes the potential for artistic beauty of a language decrease with increasing encoding efficiency?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- RugnirViking 4y ago"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.
- psychoslave 4y agoThere 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.
- fwlr 4y agoThat’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.
- beowulfey 4y agoI 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.
- wruza 4y agoIt 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language
- hoseja 4y agoProbably because some insipid journalist wrote an article about it.
- bradrn 4y agoIndeed, Yaghan is highly agglutinative: e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahgan_language#Verbs 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.)
- carschno 4y agoYou 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) 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.
- wruza 4y agoYou’re right, I could use a more related example there.
- kevinwang 4y agoHere's an interesting article about the word: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180402-mamihlapinatapai-a-lost-languages-untranslatable-legacy https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180402-mamihlapinatapai...
- mabbo 4y agoThe 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.
- some_random 4y agoThe 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.
- extasia 4y agoThats a pretty literalist interpretation.
- xdavidliu 4y agoSounds like a skooma smuggler's cave in Morrowind
- britzkopf 4y agoI 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.
- readthenotes1 4y ago"Winnie the Pooh"
- Gordonjcp 4y agoThere 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.
- rasse 4y agoI recommend the book "I Never Knew There Was a Word For It" by Adam Jacot de Boinod. It's filled with excellent words just like this one. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8180137-i-never-knew-there-was-a-word-for-it https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8180137-i-never-knew-the...
- philposting 4y agoA good song about the word, by Ronny Cox who played the police chief in Robocop: https://ronnycox.bandcamp.com/track/mamihlapinatapei https://ronnycox.bandcamp.com/track/mamihlapinatapei