untranslatable words

An uncomplete list of words untranslatable to other languages (some comments are in Russian)

• Finnish: lagom & sisu ≈ keep calm & carry on
  • lagom — шведское слово, обозначающее «точно в меру, ни больше, ни меньше»
  • sisu — финское слово, обозначающее «упорство и волю к совершению дела вне зависимости от условий»
  • Оба слова несут положительную эмоциональную окраску и считаются «непереводимыми на другие языки напрямую в достаточной степени точно»
  • du kan inte direkt översätta «lagom» lagom precis.
• Tatar: тауфиклы
  • обозначает положительную характеристику человека. Я бы перевел как "обладающий всеми (татарскими) добродетелями" (трудолюбие, смышлённость, старательность, честность, смекалка, доброта...)
• Filipino: gigil
  • trembling or gritting of the teeth in response to a situation that overwhelms your self-control
  • When a Filipina sees a baby that's so cute, she gets so overwhelmed that she wants to pinch the baby's cheeks and has a hard time controlling herself. What she's experiencing is called panggigigil.
  • Nakakagigil talaga ang bata.
  • That child is so frickin' cute!
  • (So cute I have to grit my teeth to keep myself from pinching his cheeks off.)
  • Nakakagigil ka.
  • You're so frickin' cute I can't help myself.
  • It is not necessarily cuteness that provokes this response. Sometimes, when you get frustrated with someone, you can have the gigil reaction to the person too.
  • Nanggigigil.
  • Having a hard time controlling oneself because of cuteness, frustration etc.
  • Nanggigigil ako.
  • I am having a hard time controlling myself because of cuteness, etc.
  • This is one ‘hard’ Tagalog word for translation. One guy more or less ‘explained/defined’ gigil as this: ‘the irresistible urge to pinch someone because the object/person is well liked/loved”. Gah - que haba!!! But, that made sense, doesn’t it?
  • The fact that this word exists in Filipino must mean that the Philippines are filled with an abundance of cute things, things so cute you can barely maintain your sanity as they look up at you with big doe eyes and a quivering lip. All I can say is finally; finally there is a word that expresses my previously indescribable urge to squeeze and love on something until it dies. I’m surprised we don’t have a word for this - I can’t count the amount of times I’ve overheard things such as, “OMG! That puppy is so cute, I just want to hold it, and kiss it, and love it until it explodes …”, and what about those uncomfortable moments when a family member pinches your cheek, leaving a red welt of disgrace - this happens often enough that it warrants a word in every language, I think.
  • prami batci djica / djica lo ka prami batci / pambatydji Gigil (тагальский, Филлипины) — непреодолимое желание ущипнуть или укусить своего любимого, вызванное переизбытком чувств.
  • Gigil (pronounced Gheegle; Filipino): The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute
• litost
  • "a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery" (and let us not forget the plaintive wailing of a dog that goes with that)
  • The Czech author Milan Kundera doesn't understand how non-Czech languages could possibly do without an equivalent to the Czech word "litost," to which an English speaker sort of just shrugs when he/she hears the word translated as "a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery."
  • Do not take him too seriously. This is only one of possible meanings, and the more precise word for it would be rather "sebelítost", self-pity. "Lítost" simply means regret, pity or sorrow (there is a German cognate "Leid"); it

is not a specialised word for cry in one's beer.

• prozvonit
  • A better candidate for a single word for a concept for which other languages paraphrase could be "prozvonit" - literally "to ring trough", with the meaning "to give a missed call", "to call someone but only let it ring once so that the other person will call you back". I wonder whether other languages have single word for this concept.
  • In Braz. Portuguese, an appropriate way of saying this could be "só dar um toque" or, more precisely, "só dar um toque para ligar de volta".
  • English: to missed-call someone, to prank someone. Each is a single word (or has a decent claim to being taken as such).
  • German: "(jemanden) anklingeln" (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anklingeln). It's "klingeln" (to ring) with the prefix "an-". German verbal prefixes are only semi-transparent, but this is a productive example.
  • To prank or prank-call someone doesn't have the same meaning (it's done as a (annoying) joke, while what A. da Mek is talking about calling someone to get them to call you again, or at least to remind them of some event –the callee has usually agreed with the caller on the meaning of that call, not so in a prank call–), and I've never seen the term "missed call" used as a verb. I *have* seen the verb "to calldrop" though, with the meaning intended.
  • In Italian there is the noun "squillo" which in the context of phones means "a phone call where the phone is only allowed to ring once, to convey a predefined message". It is usually used in the expression "Fare uno squillo (a qualcuno)", literally "Give (somebody) a ring". The meaning is not just "call me back", from what I've heard cellphone-equipped teenagers had developed a complex etiquette of squilli used in their social relationships (I believe that

one of the meanings was "I'm thinking about you, but I don't have anything to say worth calling").

• • The "call me back" message was implied when calling parents and other older people.
  • Nowadays the teenagers probably just chat on facebook with their smartphones, but adults still use squilli by agreeing on a specific message in advance.
  • Google "missed-call me" and "prank me" (with the inverted commas) and you'll see I'm right about both.
  • I know I did when I first read you as a prank/crank call for me, as Christophe points out, involves "Is your refrigerator running?" or "Do you have Sir Walter Raleigh in a can?" (nyuk, nyuk), but Wikipedia confirms your usage. Who knew? Right Pondian? YAEUT anyone? ;)
• saudade - nostalgie
  • "a feeling of wistful longing for something one once knew and which might never return"
  • As you said this, I'm encouraged to say that I feel that the Portuguese word "saudade" is much more generic than “a feeling of wistful longing for something one once knew and which might never return” (as also cited in the original message). It would be very natural for me to call my wife now an say "Tô com saudade! Vamos comer uma pizza?!" ("I miss you! Let's eat a pizza?!"). But I'm talking about Brazil; I don't know about Portugal, Angola, etc. **Ah, and, at least nowadays, the word "nostalgia" is stronger than "saudade" in Brazil. I think that the definition “a feeling of wistful

longing for something one once knew and which might never return” fits "nostalgia" better than "saudade". As the meaning of "saudade" is wider, it can mean exactly the same as "nostalgia" or something more unexceptional as " I miss you".

• • BTW, the Cape Verdean song "Sodade" (same word as "saudade") is really very nostalgic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_7BV-IuyKI
  • Although I don't know how strong is "I miss you" for anglophones; do you say it to someone you saw in the breakfast and want to see in the dinner again?
  • Only if you're lovesick! :)
• SUDDEN UNDERSTANDING
  • Not sure this is quite relevant, but some Kash "accidental" verb forms (with /caka-/ prefix) might qualify, e.g. from tikas 'to see' we get cakatikas basically "overcome with seeing"-- but with a dative (animate) subj. it means to have a sudden understanding of something, a sudden insight; while with a nominative subject it means 'to appear suddenly, to pop into view (esp. if inopportunely)', and quite a few others that translate into Engl. phrases or idioms.
  • You can have such nonce-forms as "cakacika" (cika (colloq.) = TV) 'someone who watches altogether too much TV), or "caka+Number" to refer to someone obsessed with that number.
• PHANARA
  • How many of us have such words in our conlangs? In Old Albic, I at least have phanara, an animate noun derived from the verb phana 'to shape' (hence also, phanas 'a shape'), which may be translated as 'gestalt' or 'morphic field'. A phanara is an entity that governs the shape of a particular object by guiding and informing the phaneri of its parts. Phaneri resonate with each other, especially ones of a similar kind, and of course with those of the parts they inform.
  • The whole universe is a huge hierarchy of nested phaneri, up to Éa ('The One') which encloses and informs the entire universe, and down to imperceptibly small elementary phaneri that make up everything (and can be identified, from a modern physics viewpoint, with the probability fields of fundamental particles in quantum mechanics).
  • The soul (nâra) of a living being is also a phanara; magic (léachvaras 'spirit-work') operates by getting one's own soul into resonance with the phanara of a target and in-forming it in order to achieve a particular event.
    • Very nice. Not dissimilar to Kash belief that something of the Creator resides in all things in their world (hence their belief in the Spirits of things).
• poshlost’
  • Poshlost or Poshlost' (Russian пошлость) is a word that has been defined as "petty evil or self-satisfied vulgarity" (Alexandrov 1991, p. 106); there is no single English translation. At more length Boym (1994, p. 41) explains:

• • Poshlost' is the Russian version of banality, with a characteristic national flavoring of metaphysics and high morality, and a peculiar conjunction of the sexual and the spiritual. This one word encompasses triviality, vulgarity, sexual promiscuity, and a lack of spirituality. The war against poshlost' was a cultural obsession of the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia from the 1860s to 1960s.