Quote:

Is there a word in English which is untranslatable?

The Welsh word hiraeth, the Portuguese word saudade, the Spanish word duende, the German word weltschmerz, Han in Chinese, and others, are considered untranslatable into another language. We can give an approximate translation. "Wistfulness"; "Nostalgia"; "Passion"; "Worldweariness"; "Bitterness". But to properly understand the elusive meanings of these words—understand them in the way that they are used by the native speakers of the language they belong to— you probably have to have lived in the culture in which they are used because the meanings are a unique part of the cultural psyche.

I'd really like to know if we have any words like this in English. But I can't think of a single candidate. Maybe it's impossible to identify these words in your own language.

Any ideas?



Of course all words can be translated by lots and lots of other words in almost any human language, so obviously what Hydra is really asking is are there any "concepts" that are so culturely intrenched by standard English that they can't be translated into another language.

The classic answer is "yes". The language of the Hopi indians had their own construction of "time" that defied our attempts to integrate
our concept of time into their particular scheme of things.

To the Hopis the abstraction "time" was intertwined in the vernacular with physical distance within an omnipresent "now", and the crazy but neato Hopi language proscribed any relationship of "cause" with "effect".*


* Buy me this book and I will point out the verse and chapter to which I refer...

http://www.amazon.com/Hopi-Time-Linguistic-Linguistics-Monographs/dp/9027933499

Last edited by themilum; 12/12/06 02:58 AM.