dorchadas | On untranslatable words (Reply)

One of my pet peeves is the phrase "untranslatable words" and all those lists of various words from other languages that don't exist in English. Now, I know what they mean--they mean that words like 木漏れ日 komorebi or פירגון firgun don't have exact one-to-one equivalents in English, but that's not the same as being untranslatable. All human languages can express the sum total of human experience. For example:

komorebi means "the sunlight filtering through the leaves."
firgun means "unselfish joy felt when viewing other's accomplishments."

Sure, English doesn't have words for those specific concepts but that doesn't mean they're untranslatable because I just translated them! And sometimes they do have exact equivalents in non-English languages--for example, firgun translated into Sanskrit is muditā. Sometimes these articles seem to imply that English has a particular paucity of expression, and that's simply not true. English actually has a very high number of words compared to other languages. The Akademyah estimates around 45,000 words in modern Hebrew, not counting compound words. French has around 60,000, whereas English has over 100,000. But that also runs into its own problem of "what is a word." To pick something relevant to my own hobbies, there's eternal debate over "video games" vs. "videogames." Spellcheck tells me the former is correct and that's the spelling I used in my DW tag, but the latter spelling looks more correct to me now, and it's a word whereas the former is not.

Anyway, here's a few English words that don't often have a single-word equivalent in other languages: