3 July 2014
Eleven untranslatable words
By Fiona Macdonald
Norwegians have a word that means ‘to sit outside on a sunny day enjoying a beer’. BBC Culture meets an artist fascinated by languages’ unique terms.
My comments: Years ago, I asked a relative who had lived in the States for more than 20 years how they say "嫵媚" in English. She thought for a while and said there seemed to be no English word for this Mandarin term. I don't think Mandarin has a word for this Norwegian word.
In 1983, the writers Douglas Adams and John Lloyd compiled The Meaning of Liff, “a dictionary of things that there aren't any words for yet”. It included such words as ‘ahenny’, meaning ‘the way people stand when examining other people's bookshelves’. Similarly, designer Anjana Iyer illustrates words that describe emotions and situations so precisely they summon a smile of recognition.
There is one clear difference, though: Iyer has not invented them. The definitions she illustrates – 60 so far, from 30 different languages – match The Meaning of Liff for absurdity, but all of them are real. There is komorebi, Japanese for ‘the sort of scattered dappled light effect that happens when sunlight shines in through trees’; or rire dans sa barbe, a French expression meaning ‘to laugh in your beard quietly while thinking about something that happened in the past’.
Iyer’s Found in Translation project will be published as a book later in 2014. She has been a polyglot since childhood. “My parents come from different parts of India, so I grew up learning five languages,” she says. “I’d always loved the word Fernweh, which is German for ‘longing for a place you’ve never been to’, and then one day I started collecting more.”
Some are humorous, while others have definitions that read like poetry. “I love the German word Waldeinsamkeit, ‘the feeling of being alone in the woods’. “It captures a sense of solitude and at the same time that feeling of oneness with nature.” Her favourite is the Inuit word Iktsuarpok, which means ‘the frustration of waiting for someone to turn up’, because “it holds so much meaning. It’s waiting, whether you are waiting for the bus to show up or for the love of your life. It perfectly describes that inner anguish associated with waiting.”
The project has expanded Iyer’s vocabulary. “I use the words in my conversations a lot. Even when I’m Tweeting, I use these words because it’s an easier way to explain things – if I want to grab a beer with some friends, I use the Norwegian word utepils,” which means ‘to sit outside on a sunny day enjoying a beer’. But she doesn’t just see the words as a form of shorthand: “By expanding people’s vocabularies, you’re expanding their imaginations as well; you’re expanding what they can imagine.”
Iyer was careful to research how the words were used as well as their literal definition. “What I found is that with the internet, you can find out the meaning of a word but you don’t necessarily understand its cultural context.
“Each language has all these unique ways to express things and unique stories to tell, and you’re missing out on all of that if you’re just using Google Translate – you’re losing the beauty of it. You can’t just use machines for translation, you need the human touch.”
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