The Magic of “Untranslatable” Words

The idea that &quot;our world [is] parsed and circumscribed as it is by the limits of our vocabulary&quot; is nuts. Just because there&#x27;s not a one-to-one correspondence between a word in a language and a word in another, does not mean you can&#x27;t express the same content through a combination of words and sentences.<p>The fact that the author was able to write this article and convey these concepts in English shows that the idea that vocabulary limits our experience is incoherent.

There is an interesting concept in machine learning called &quot;word vectors&quot; or word2vec. They measure how often words occur near each other, and then try to reduce it to a vector that carries most of that information. This results in similar words having similar vectors. And even a very interesting result that you can do math on them. E.g. &quot;king&quot;-&quot;man&quot;+&quot;woman&quot; gives a word vector very close to &quot;queen&quot;. I imagine this is at least somewhat similar to how words are represented in the human brain.<p>I wonder if you looked at the space of all word vectors, and found areas where words were missing. Do to some quirk of language, there was no word to represent that point in concept space. You could also compared the vector space for multiple different languages, and automatically determine what words don&#x27;t have equivalents.

Kiasu on his list is essentially &#x27;FOMO&#x27; - fear of missing out. I think acronyms are an interesting way to integrate some of these untranslatable words into our own cultural lexicon.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drtimlomas.com&#x2F;#!lexicography&#x2F;cm4mi" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drtimlomas.com&#x2F;#!lexicography&#x2F;cm4mi</a>

There are also vocabulary items that do have direct translations into other languages, but none with the same precise connotation.<p>For example, 斯文 from Chinese most directly translates as &#x27;refined&#x27; or &#x27;cultured&#x27; in English.<p>In Chinese, the term has a strong positive connotation and can be used an almost any context to compliment any person; it carries the implication that the person is of good character and education.<p>In American English, &#x27;refined&#x27; feels mostly neutral (shading into a pejorative with &#x27;effete&#x27;) and while &#x27;cultured&#x27; has a positive connotation, it doesn&#x27;t directly speak to the person&#x27;s character.<p>What we see is that cultural norms and values become embedded in the vocabulary of languages. Even a directly, literal translation will not capture the same implied attitude. That&#x27;s why translations of books and the like tend to avoid close word-for-word readings.

Signed Languages of the Deaf people have many «untranslatable» expressions. Especially of forms, movement and dynamics like the way a flock of birds is flying around in the sky, or the specific way a toon is squashed in an accident and pops up again.

As a musician, I&#x27;ve often wondered how a performer whose native language contained such words as &quot;allegro&quot;, &quot;largo&quot;, &quot;andante&quot; interpreted those markings vs me, whose native language does not contain those words.<p>To me, &quot;allegro&quot; is a tempo marking, not a state of being, for the most part.<p>I&#x27;m not actually sure who is getting the short end of the stick, in this particular instance, to tell you the truth.

Amusingly one of these untranslatable words is is in fact both a direct back translation from another language and has actually taken on an entirely different meaning.<p>&quot;Take the German noun Treppenwitz, which literally means ‘staircase wit’: that all too common phenomenon of a witty rejoinder that comes to mind just after an interaction!&quot;<p>Only that&#x27;s not the meaning in German.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier</a>

Does anyone know if there is a word that roughly expresses: A feeling of anxiety or unease because you strongly believe there is a problem with a thing but don&#x27;t know exactly what

A similar idea is that of abandoned tech and terminated&#x2F;less lucrative branches of tech within functional branches, like image display tech (I.e. mechanical TV&gt;crt&gt;plasma&gt;lcd&gt;oled)w where research grinds nearly to a halt. We can learn a lot by looking back and seeing some odd tech that was a neat demonstration 100 years ago, that we basically forgot about, but might make commercial sense today.

For those who speak multiple languages: can you think of some examples (besides technical words) that don&#x27;t have clean translations into languages besides English?<p>Surely there must be some... English speakers (especially native ones) just don&#x27;t consider them to be notable due to familiarity.

There&#x27;s no such thing as the &quot;Untranslatable&quot; Word if universal grammar is for actual. At least up to turing completenes, as any language should suffice to describe a turing machine. Yeah, I don&#x27;t know about &quot;Magic&quot;.

So are there single English words that are somehow untranslatable into some other language?

problem: in language L there is no word with meaning M<p>solution: propose&#x2F;coin new word W in language L with meaning M