Untraslatable like you
Short list of foreign words that we cannot easily translate.
When I was 11 I was sent one month in a CISV summer camp abroad, with kids from 12 different nations.
I remember the mindblowing discovery that my native culture was just one of the possible options. We played a lot of games about differencies, especially between languages: it’s absolutely not obvious that different languages have different grammar structure and, even more surprising, different concepts. Sometimes, when a sentence is lilterally traslated, it makes no sense at all or it changes it — for example, in german you can ask “kannst du mir Feuer geben?” to get a lighter for your cigarette, but literally translated in italian it means “can you set me on fire?”
Each single concept gets born when it has a word to label it: it’s that simple. At the end, learning different languages not only gives you access to a wider range of concepts, but it shows you much more about your own native language, its limits, and about the features of your own culture.
On the internet there are many lists of beautifully untraslatable words. I just collected my favourites:
1-Verschlimmbessern (German) — to make things worse while attempting to improve them
2-Tartle (Scottish) — the act of hestitating while introducing someone because you’ve forgotten their name.
3- Wabi-Sabi (Japanese) — finding beauty in imperfection, and accepting the natural cycle of growth and decay.
4- Gezellig (Dutch) — the warm, comfortable feeling of being with people you love in a cozy place.
5- Utepils (Norwegian) — a beer drunk outdoors
6- Abbiocco (italian) — the feeling of blury brain and lazyness during digestion or after a joint (I’ve recently experienced the feeling of being lost outside of my own language, while trying to express my abbiocco situation)
7- Gökotta (Swedish) — to wake up early and go outside to hear the first birds sing.
Of course the list could be infinite. In case you would like to enrich your vocabolary and -consequentially- get some new concept, there is more than a website dedicated to this matter, I suggest to check better than english.
–This was my first post ever! I wrote it in June 2016 during my European Volutary Service. That summer camp when I was 11 was my first real travel experience, and it took me 15 more years to realize that I need to explore the world as I need oxigen. But it’s never too late. As a chinese wiseman once said: ‘two are the best moments to plant a tree: 20 years ago and now”.
You can click on the heart here below, just to make a stranger -me- a bit more happy today :-)
