Word geekery!
Oct. 14th, 2010 05:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lagilman20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World
I love "tartle" (Scottish – The act of hesitating while introducing someone because you’ve forgotten their name) and "saudade" (Portuguese – One of the most beautiful of all words, translatable or not, this word “refers to the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost."), and of course we all know schadenfreude - but some of the others made me stop and go "oh, yes. That. I've felt that but never had a single word for it before. Now I do."
Words. Lovely things, they are.
More, tho - having just spent 2+ weeks living in countries where English was a distant second language, portions of this article really struck home: "For myself, the hardest part about learning a new language isn’t so much getting acquainted with the translations of vocabulary and different grammatical forms and bases, but developing an inner reflex that responds to words’ texture, not their translated “ingredients”. When you hear the word “criminal” you don’t think of “one who commits acts outside the law,” but rather the feeling and mental imagery that comes with that word."
Yes. it's when that happens, when you begin to think not what the word means, but what it conjures, then you know you're beginning to understand the language....
(and why translators, good ones, are such magicians, to take the essence rather than the literality, and make it come alive without losing the original writer's style or voice...)
I love "tartle" (Scottish – The act of hesitating while introducing someone because you’ve forgotten their name) and "saudade" (Portuguese – One of the most beautiful of all words, translatable or not, this word “refers to the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost."), and of course we all know schadenfreude - but some of the others made me stop and go "oh, yes. That. I've felt that but never had a single word for it before. Now I do."
Words. Lovely things, they are.
More, tho - having just spent 2+ weeks living in countries where English was a distant second language, portions of this article really struck home: "For myself, the hardest part about learning a new language isn’t so much getting acquainted with the translations of vocabulary and different grammatical forms and bases, but developing an inner reflex that responds to words’ texture, not their translated “ingredients”. When you hear the word “criminal” you don’t think of “one who commits acts outside the law,” but rather the feeling and mental imagery that comes with that word."
Yes. it's when that happens, when you begin to think not what the word means, but what it conjures, then you know you're beginning to understand the language....
(and why translators, good ones, are such magicians, to take the essence rather than the literality, and make it come alive without losing the original writer's style or voice...)
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Date: 2010-10-15 08:05 pm (UTC)I love this word because when you see the translation of it, you experience the emotion it describes.