The “untranslatable” words

Chapter 1

The many shapes of longing

Portuguese saudade is often called the most Portuguese of words: a longing for someone or something absent, perhaps never to return, sweet and sad at once. Welsh hiraeth is a yearning for home — a home you may not be able to return to, or that perhaps never was. Nabokov wrote that no single English word renders all the shades of Russian тоска (toska): at its deepest a spiritual anguish without cause, lower down “a longing with nothing to long for”, and at its lowest plain boredom.

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Chapter 2

Cosy, and just enough

Danish hygge has lately conquered the world: candlelight, a warm drink, the snug ease of being with people you are close to. Dutch gezellig is similar, with a little more bustle — a room, a party or a person can all be gezellig. Swedish lagom means “not too much, not too little: just right”. The internet likes to say it comes from Vikings passing a drinking horn “around the team” (laget om); that is folk etymology — it comes from Old Swedish lag, “law”, as in “the amount custom allows”. Swedes also have fika: stopping for coffee and something sweet with colleagues or friends, a word made by turning an old word for coffee, kaffi, back to front.

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Chapter 3

Between people

Korean 눈치 (nunchi, literally “eye-measure”) is the knack of reading a room: sensing the mood the moment you walk in, knowing what to say and what to leave unsaid. Persian تعارف (taarof) is an etiquette of courtesy: the host insists, the guest declines, the shopkeeper may even say there is nothing to pay — and both sides know it is a ritual. In Zulu and the other Nguni languages of southern Africa, ubuntu is the idea that we become ourselves through others: “a person is a person through other people”. Chinese 缘分 (yuánfèn), the bond of chance or fate that brings two people together, takes a sentence to explain in most languages. And Tagalog kilig — the giddy flutter when the person you like so much as glances at you — entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2016.

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Chapter 4

Words for everyday life

Spanish sobremesa is the time after a meal when no one hurries to leave the table and the talk goes on — sometimes longer than the meal itself. Japanese 積ん読 (tsundoku), a word from the Meiji era, fuses “leave piled up” (tsunde oku) with “reading” (dokusho): books bought, stacked ever higher, never read. In Indonesia, jam karet is “rubber time”: appointments that stretch. And Hindi जुगाड़ (jugaad) is a clever, make-do fix out of whatever is to hand.

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Chapter 5

A picture in a word

Japanese 木漏れ日 (komorebi) is sunlight dappling through the leaves of trees. Turkish yakamoz is the glitter of light on the sea at night — the glow of tiny bioluminescent plankton, or the path the moon lays across the water. And Finnish has an old measure of distance, poronkusema, literally “reindeer’s pee”: how far a reindeer could pull a sledge before it had to stop to relieve itself, about seven and a half kilometres.

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Chapter 6

Beware the lists

“The Inuit have a hundred words for snow” is perhaps the most widespread of all language legends. It goes back to a passage by the anthropologist Franz Boas in 1911, which gave just four roots: snow on the ground, falling snow, drifting snow and a snowdrift. Retold again and again, the count swelled to dozens, then hundreds. Inuit languages glue many pieces into one long word, so “how many words” is hard to count in the first place — and English has snow, sleet, slush, blizzard and more. Another regular is mamihlapinatapai from Yaghan in Tierra del Fuego, said to mean “a look between two people, each hoping the other will offer to do what both want but neither will begin”, and named by Guinness the most succinct word. That gloss comes from a nineteenth-century missionary’s dictionary, and its exact sense is still debated. In the end, anything can be said in any language; what these words show is what a culture found worth a name of its own.

The four snow roots are from Boas’s introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911).

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