Why does Albanian need 27 words for 'moustache'?

October 2, 2005 4:14 AM

Charming and unexpected vocabulary from many languages. Why did Persians need a word, alghunjar, to express 'the feigned anger of a mistress'? Could there really have been that many insincere mistresses in Persia? Why does Russia need a word meaning, 'dealer in stolen cats'? Or 'someone with six fingers'? And who can resist the Chinese xiaoxiao, meaning, 'the whistling and pattering of rain or wind'? "These are more than funny foreign vocabularies; they are tiny windows into the way other people live, and the obsessions that drive them." [via]
posted by Slithy_Tove (89 comments total)

Not everyone enjoyed this book as much as the Independent’s reviewer [via].
posted by misteraitch at 4:30 AM on October 2, 2005

SENZURI Japanese

Male masturbation (literally "a hundred rubs"). "Shiko shiko manzuri" is the female version (literally "ten thousand rubs").
posted by srboisvert at 4:36 AM on October 2, 2005

It always seems strange to me that people link to Language Log and not Languagehat. Anyway, regardless of the merits of Sapir-Worf as debated by linguists, there's a pop variety of Sapir-Worf that's as misleading as it is interesting and this is one example.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 4:59 AM on October 2, 2005

By the way, here's mefi's own languagehat's entry on this book.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 5:03 AM on October 2, 2005

I think this is awesome. Thank you so much.

As part of my gratitude, I went and found this poem that mentions something similar:

A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old still remember something that they could say

but they know now that such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words

many of the things the words were about
no long exist

the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I

the children will not repeat
the phrases their parents speak

somebody has persuaded them
that it is better to say everthing differently

so that they can be admired somewhere
farther and farther away

where nothing that is here is known
we have little to say to each other

we are wrong and dark
in the eyes of the new owners

the radio is incomprehensible
the day is glass

when there is a voice at the door it is foreign
everywhere instead of a name there is a lie

nobody has seen it happening
nobody remembers

this is what the words were made
to prophesy

here are the extinct feathers
here is the rain we saw

- Losing A Language, W.S. Merwin
posted by shmegegge at 5:04 AM on October 2, 2005

wait, it's not reliable?

well, now I wish I hadn't busted out the poem for such an unworthy cause.

meh.
posted by shmegegge at 5:24 AM on October 2, 2005

this is why I think oversea semesters should be mandatory for college degrees. other languages depict alternate realities, and could do much for everyone, especially those who resent the idea most (proud non-travellers)
posted by Busithoth at 5:28 AM on October 2, 2005

"other languages depict alternate realities"

See?
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 5:34 AM on October 2, 2005

Remember sniglets from Not Necessarily The News?

The one I always remember and still use is "Musquirt":

Musquirt (mus' kwirt) - n. The water that comes out of the initial squirts of a squeeze mustard bottle.
posted by zardoz at 5:59 AM on October 2, 2005

The different names for @
posted by srboisvert at 6:23 AM on October 2, 2005

I love stuff like this.

Someone should mention The Meaning of Liff here. I volunteer.

I come from Grimsby and I have to say that it's one of the best definitions in the whole thing.
posted by Decani at 6:29 AM on October 2, 2005

> Why does Russia need a word meaning, 'dealer in stolen
> cats'?

Have you *seen* the hats they wear? All specialist trades tend to develop their own vocabulary.

Today, I learned that among poker pros, a girlfriend seeking commitment in their relationship is described as 'bluffing'.

However, I couldn't figure out if the correct response to such a bluff would be to call, raise or fold -- and what the potential implications of each term would be.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 6:36 AM on October 2, 2005

rhaphanidoô¹ to thrust a radish up the fundament, a punishment of adulterers in Athens, Ar. [from rha^pha^nis]
posted by tss at 6:52 AM on October 2, 2005

A tiny window into the obsessions that drive them, indeed.
posted by tss at 6:57 AM on October 2, 2005

Anyway, regardless of the merits of Sapir-Worf as debated by linguists, there's a pop variety of Sapir-Worf that's as misleading as it is interesting and this is one example.

Ethereal Bligh, could you explain to us the difference between Sapir-Whorf and its pop variant? Is it just that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (i.e. there is a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it) is much narrower a claim than the pop variety "different languages, different realities"? Or is there something more?
posted by Herr Fahrstuhl at 7:03 AM on October 2, 2005

Excellent, thanks.

As an aside: web users who liked this post also liked "They Have a Word For It" by Howard Rheingold.

(Which, incidentally, was translated into Dutch under the unbelievable title "Koro. n., Chinese. The hysterical notion that your penis keeps decreasing in size", one of the many entries in the book.)
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 7:25 AM on October 2, 2005

Seems to be really pushing the use of paraphrases even when it doesn't seem necessary:

NING-NONG Indonesia

The ringing of a doorbell.

Ding-dong?

KERTEK Malay

The sound of dry leaves or twigs being trodden underfoot.

Crackling?

YUYIN Chinese

The remnants of sound that stay in the ears of the hearer

Echo?
posted by funambulist at 7:27 AM on October 2, 2005

"Ethereal Bligh, could you explain to us the difference between Sapir-Whorf and its pop variant?"

Well, prior to a defense of Sapir-Whorf by our very own languagehat (a linguist, in the off-chance that everyone isn't aware of this by now), everything I'd heard from linguists about Sapir-Whorf was extremely negative. So I wouldn't have made the distinction until recently. I make the distinction now as a result of reading languagehat's defense and in acknolwedgment of his expertise which I lack.

Clearly, it's a matter of common sense that different languages have somewhat different perspectives on the world. It's hard to understand how someone could categorically deny this. However, the vulgar version of S-W makes a much stronger claim in two respects. First, it claims a very relativistic worldview that is either a function of a language or a language is a function of it. Second, it implicitly (or sometimes explicitly) asserts that a language is arbitrary. A core linguistics assertion is that this is definitely not the case.

These work together to present something like the very broad claim "different languages, different realities".

The classic contention, which you'll hear in many an undergraduate class and in the pub, is that Eskimos have some large number of different words meaning different kinds of snow in contrast to, say English. But the truth is that English has a large number of words referring to different kinds of snow: powder, slush, hard pack, etc. The cognitive gulf between languages is not as wide as is claimed. And if it's not so astonishingly wide, then what you're left with, in my opinion, is merely a truism.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 7:28 AM on October 2, 2005

Anyway, regardless of the merits of Sapir-Worf as debated by linguists, there's a pop variety of Sapir-Worf that's as misleading as it is interesting and this is one example.

I also would like to know what the "pop variety" entails exactly, but would like to add that at my Cognitive Science department we tend to distinguish between a "weak" version of Sapir-Whorf ("there is a relationship between your thoughts and the specific language(s) you speak") which is very conservatively put and difficult to define but probably true, and a "strong" version ("all thought is shaped by the language(s) you speak") which gives way to the notion that some languages are somehow better than others, in turn providing a justification for oppression and possibly fascism.

The consensus, as far as I can tell, is that we're pretty much agreed on the weak version, although it is difficult to quantify or make any concrete statements about, but that the strong version is ultimately indefensible.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 7:35 AM on October 2, 2005

Thanks for the clarification, EB.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 7:36 AM on October 2, 2005

By the way, here's mefi's own languagehat's entry on this book.

Well glad I read that (and the post at languagelog) cos this sort of lists always has me a bit suspicious. They really do seem to exaggerate the "weird exotic foreign words" factor at all costs. Just to pick some other examples from the article:

- CAPOCLAQUE Italian

Someone who co-ordinates a group of clappers.

It's a compound of two words. Capo = leader. Claque is French for clap. Italian-English dictionaries all translate that as "claque leader" or "clap leader". Look, two words in English, too!

So what's the odd thing here? Maybe there is some other way of saying it in English, I don't know as I've never come across the term in either language before, but there's no need to paraphrase something that is not a weird word and has a perfectly straightforward translation. Unless you just want to push the notion that it's not translatable even when it is.

- POMICIONE Italian

A man who seizes any chance of being in close physical contact with a woman.

It's from the verb pomiciare = to smooch, snog. "Pomicione" in that sense is rather outdated but anyway it's translated in English dictionaries in only two words: lecherous man. Or it can also simply mean snogger.


- SMONTA Italian

A theft carried out on a bus or train, from which the perpetrator descends as quickly as possible.

Never heard this, and it's not even in the dictionary. I guess it has to be slang. The meaning of the verb smontare, here in relation to trains or bus (or bikes or horses), is quite simply "get off".

It's funny because I find slang terms in English a lot more creative than this in using common words.

- SQUADRETTA Italian

A group of prison guards who specialise in beating up inmates.

That's prison slang, that meaning is not something an Italian would know unless they were familiar with that slang in the first place or looked it up in the dictionary. Literally it's just "small team", if you were talking about sports, here it would translate to "small squad" or "gang". Again, as if prison slang in English wasn't more inventive.

- FYRASSISTENT Danish

An assistant lighthouse keeper.

Fyr = lighthouse. Assistent, duh, assistant. How odd is that! Man, those Danes are so quaint! :)


Of course there are actual examples in English too, of words, especially compounds or idiomatic or whatnot, that may not be translated in another language with one word. (Like for instance in Italian for "whistleblower" you have to use a paraphrase.) So it's all relative to which language you're starting from. Obviously.

The more two languages differ in terms of alphabet, grammar, syntax, structure of words and sentences and so on, the more you're likely to run into that kind of "untranslatable" words, but, whether it takes one or more individual terms in a given language to say the same thing another language says more concisely, the meaning can still be conveyed. You may lose some nuances in certain cases but there's no such thing as completely untranslatable concepts.
posted by funambulist at 7:41 AM on October 2, 2005

Oh, and for what it's worth, out of the three examples cited in the Independent article which I am qualified to judge, two are accurate (Zechpreller=a person who leaves without paying his tab and Torschlusspanik=the fear of diminishing opportunities as one gets older) and one I have never heard of (Agobilles=A burglar's tools). The latter does quite positively not belong to the German language.
posted by Herr Fahrstuhl at 7:45 AM on October 2, 2005

For the reverse case, I heard that "spam" meaning unsolicited e-mail is one of the hardest english words to translate into other languages/cultures.
posted by sandking at 7:46 AM on October 2, 2005

That "Koro" thing was in the article, I know see. It was Japanese, not Chinese.

QUEESTING Dutch

Allowing a lover access to one's bed, under the covers, for a chit-chat.

I have never heard of this word. Google doesn't help much either. It is also not in the dictionary.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 7:47 AM on October 2, 2005

For the reverse case, I heard that "spam" meaning unsolicited e-mail is one of the hardest english words to translate into other languages/cultures.

Well, it's a tech word, deeply steeped in modern culture (unless the Monty Python connection has been debunked as apocryphal, which I'm not aware of). So you just don't translate it, or translate it as "spam". I don't see how that is difficult as opposed to idioms with really subtle (implied) meanings, as the article haphazardly tries to convey.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 7:50 AM on October 2, 2005

There needs to be a word for the frustration felt by one watching someone google who isn't using the terms one would.
posted by bonaldi at 7:54 AM on October 2, 2005

Oddly, "agobilles" does show up in French, with a note saying that it is very old. I have never heard of it, just thought I'd add this.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 7:55 AM on October 2, 2005

Which terms would one use, bonaldi?
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 7:56 AM on October 2, 2005

The remnants of sound that stay in the ears of the hearer

Echo?

Or how you can't stop hearing that goofy phrase you just said to your boss, or that insult your lover sprung on you. You know, sound in your ears instead of actual sound waves still making the rounds.
posted by artifarce at 7:56 AM on October 2, 2005

Herr Fahrstuhl: you're right, agobilles is French slang actually. here the definition in French is both burglar's tools and tools in general, or useless junk.
posted by funambulist at 7:56 AM on October 2, 2005

Some cultures have words to describe emotional states that have to be paraphrased in English. These words would appear to lead to the more relevant psychological differences, compared to the fact that the Danish have a word for lighthouse Assistant. For example, there's schadenfreude in German, which is also in use in English, as I understand (the feeling of enjoyment over someone else's misfortune). Two examples I found most striking when I first came across them in a psychology textbook are the Japanese amae and the portuguese saudade. The first one apparently describes the mixture of dependence and security that e.g. a child feels for a mother, while the second appears to be a kind of poetic longing or melancholy.

Examples like these can give quite powerful insights into other cultures, especially the last two, because they appear to be quite central to their respective culture.

On preview: @bonaldi: googlagony?
posted by Herr Fahrstuhl at 8:00 AM on October 2, 2005 [1 favorite]

Which terms would one use, bonaldi?

Whoa, for a moment there I thought you were referring to my Google link on "queesting", hence my reply. Sorry about that. I get a lot of googlagony as well.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 8:11 AM on October 2, 2005

That's true but you couldn't really fill a whole book with those genuinely unique words. I guess that's why the author went out of his way to include words that are nowhere near the example of "schadenfreude".

Now here's one Italian word that both requires a paraphrase and is rather insightful:

dietrologia: obsessive search for a hidden agenda, belief in conspiracy theory

(it literally means something like "analysis of what is behind something" - dietro = behind, -logia is the same as the -logy suffix in English, as in philology, psychology etc.)

Very used in politics. Typically government responds to criticism by accusing opposition of playing "dietrologia", or viceversa. It's almost like a routine by now.
posted by funambulist at 8:18 AM on October 2, 2005

Why did Persians need
Why does Russia need

Having and needing can be different. We have much more of just about everything than we need.

tiny windows into the way other people live, and the obsessions that drive them

Just because a language has a word doesn't mean it's speakers are obsessed with it's referent.

Fun though. Xiaoxiao sounded like a real find until googled.
posted by scheptech at 9:00 AM on October 2, 2005

I was amused until I read through the language[log|hat] article. Now I'm suspicious of all of them, except for one that I'll hold out for until the bitter end:
AKA'AKA'A Hawaiian
Skin peeling or falling off after either sunburn or heavy drinking
How much do you have to drink before your skin falls off?
posted by boo_radley at 9:03 AM on October 2, 2005

goodnewsfortheinsane : "I don't see how [spam] is difficult as opposed to idioms with really subtle (implied) meanings, as the article haphazardly tries to convey."

I don't know if "spam" is difficult to translate, but I would say that while we say "unsolicited e-mail", that is in itself a bit of a shortcut. After all, a friend of mine from high school sent me an e-mail recently out of the blue, so it was both e-mail and unsolicited, but it wasn't spam. If I were to write it up as it is here:

SPAM English

Unsolicited and undesired e-mail advertising goods or services

Not difficult, per se, but neither are any of examples provided in the link.

Also, to throw my hat into the ring, "peko-peko" in Japanese does not mean "bowing one's head repeatedly in a fawning or grovelling manner", it just means "grovel". I can't for the life of me figure out what's so bizarre about Japanese having a single word to express something that English also has a single word for.
posted by Bugbread at 9:06 AM on October 2, 2005

I also would like to know what the "pop variety" entails exactly, but would like to add that at my Cognitive Science department we tend to distinguish between a "weak" version of Sapir-Whorf ("there is a relationship between your thoughts and the specific language(s) you speak") which is very conservatively put and difficult to define but probably true, and a "strong" version ("all thought is shaped by the language(s) you speak") which gives way to the notion that some languages are somehow better than others, in turn providing a justification for oppression and possibly fascism.

Woah, that's quite a jump. I don't think Sapir or Whorf were fascist, (most social scientists, are very liberal). And the rejection of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn't about politics (if it were dismissed because of that, it would be a bad thing) The hypothesis was rejected because its stupid, and it doesn't stand up to evidence gathered by experimentation. Even if it was true, it still wouldn't make different languages "better" or "worse", and it certainly wouldn't make different ethnic groups better or worse, because they can all learn any language (in theory)

It seem like there are basically three version of Sapir-Whorf we're talking about. "Weak", "Strong" and "pop". IMO the 'pop' version is just a simplification of the Strong version, IMO. And it probably means a something a little different.

Certainly, I think language is somewhat changed by culture, since people are going to come up with words for concepts that come up often. A society that doesn’t have mistresses is not going to have a lot of words relating to mistress disposition, for example.

Are there differences between the way a word is understood in different languages? Sure. But there are differences between the way the word is understood between different people who speak the same language as well. "Antebellum" probably means something a little different to everyone, depending on where they heard it first, etc.

Examples like these [amae, saudade] can give quite powerful insights into other cultures, especially the last two, because they appear to be quite central to their respective culture.

In English we'd just use the word love in the first case, and 'melancholy' in the second.
posted by delmoi at 9:12 AM on October 2, 2005

How much do you have to drink before your skin falls off?

Maybe that refers to passing out in the sun. Many of the life-threatening sunburns I have seen involved that scenario.

It might equally well apply to passing out in the hot tub.
posted by StickyCarpet at 9:20 AM on October 2, 2005

googlagony is great! now I need a word for unintentionally-insulting-someone's-google-fu-on-a-chatboard-when you-didn't-see-their-post-just-above-yours.
posted by bonaldi at 9:30 AM on October 2, 2005

PAUKIKAPE Ancient Greek

The collar worn by slaves while grinding corn, in order to stop them eating it.

Gee, I didn't realize they had corn from North America in Ancient Greece.
posted by Lex Tangible at 9:40 AM on October 2, 2005

In English we'd just use the word love in the first case, and 'melancholy' in the second.

But that would be simplifying their meaning, like translating glücklich as "happy" and ignoring that it also means "lucky".

Lex, "corn" just means grain. We use it to mean maize, the English use it to mean wheat.
posted by cali at 9:43 AM on October 2, 2005

One word which I have been unable to adequately translate from English to Spanish is "Nice". "Bueno", "agradable", "correcto", "simpatico", none express the same concept.
My code-switching relatives in Miami will say things like "tu nueva novia es muy nice".
posted by signal at 9:58 AM on October 2, 2005

NING-NONG Indonesia

The ringing of a doorbell.

Ding-dong?

Ting Tawng - Thai

A little bit crazy.
posted by FieldingGoodney at 9:58 AM on October 2, 2005

I say we start arbitarily producing and using words as to confuse linguists of the future. Dogging printertarian liver riboflavorin welsh the mellon baron grip bah reader foric cannon lanolin bit tall a googlagony, byzantine mandarin.
posted by TwelveTwo at 10:02 AM on October 2, 2005

@signal: I suppose there is quite a bit to be learned about language by listening to the way bilingual communities mix the words from the two languages.
posted by Herr Fahrstuhl at 10:03 AM on October 2, 2005

ANGUSHTI ZA'ID Russian

Someone with six fingers.

I must have learned a different kind of Russian.
posted by Krrrlson at 10:09 AM on October 2, 2005

Why does Albanian need 27 words for 'moustache'?

Here are nine English words for different kinds of moustaches. I bet with some careful slang research we could triple that number. Crustache? Lemmy?
posted by climalene at 10:09 AM on October 2, 2005

Someone on the internets claims the above is actually a mixture of Gypsy and Arabic.
posted by Krrrlson at 10:11 AM on October 2, 2005

Googlagony is a fantastic word.
posted by Catfry at 10:16 AM on October 2, 2005

Herr Fahrstuhl : "I suppose there is quite a bit to be learned about language by listening to the way bilingual communities mix the words from the two languages."

True, but you also have to watch for the timing involved. For example, most foreigners in Japan who've lived here since the late 90's or earlier tend to use the word "keitai" (mobile phone / cellular phone / cellphone) instead of their English equivalents, even though the equivalent terms exist in English. In that example, it's due to the fact that cellular phones were relatively uncommon in our home countries when we moved here, and were much more popular here. When you hear "keitai" a million times a day, and you almost never hear the word "cell-phone", the word "keitai" takes that role. People who moved to Japan later (2002ish) tend to use the English words, as they were quite established in their vocabulary before they even came to Japan.

A bunch of careless sociologists would conclude, by studying 30something ex-pats, that English had no satisfactory word for cellular phone, forcing us to use the Japanese word even when speaking in English.

climalene : "Here are nine English words for different kinds of moustaches. I bet with some careful slang research we could triple that number. Crustache? Lemmy?"

Copstache.
posted by Bugbread at 10:21 AM on October 2, 2005

Hmm, Ding Dong (Warning: flash) is the name of a Chinese cartoon character. (no suffering from googlagony here, ding dong is the thrd google link, the first, well, is just wierd)

Also, XiaoXiao is the name of one of my coworkers...
posted by PurplePorpoise at 10:28 AM on October 2, 2005

Things like this are cute, but if the investigator is unable understand context or origin of a word, it's pretty much useless.

I have worked with Russians, Czechs, Ukrainians, Slovaks and Poles. I constantly hear from them that there is no English equivalent to word they particularly love. It's almost always bullshit. There is a word. What is missing is a cultural context or touch stone rooted in their everyday use of English.

A good example is Kundera's discussion of 'litost'-- an "untranslatable" word that strattles tragedy and self pity. We do have words for litost, and even a pretty exact translation (woefullness) that isn't used much. What we are missing is a cultural context that ties ties all these together. I use the word litost in Czech,in contexts I would express differently as a native speaker of English. I can express each one in English just fine. But I don't have the same fascination and familiarity with Beidermeyer poetry that has colored Czech.

I am not a native speaker of Russian, but I am relatively certain that koshatnik is mostly used metaphorically, and it probably has origins in an event or historical crisis, since selling cats isn't really a vital part of Russian life and culture. I didn't find the word in my Russian dictionaries, but I will keep looking.

Sorry to be long winded. I miss linguistics and find this really fascinating.
posted by gesamtkunstwerk at 10:40 AM on October 2, 2005

Lex -- the English use the word corn for what North Americans call "wheat". and call corn "sweet corn" (and put it on pizzas)
posted by Rumple at 11:44 AM on October 2, 2005

I imagine that in 50 years, someone in will put together a list of crazy foreign words with no equivalent. On it will be Santorum. People will be mystified as to why English speakers needed a word to describe that particular mix of... well, you know.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:45 AM on October 2, 2005

WAR NAM NIHADAN Persian
To murder somebody, bury their body, then grow some flowers over the grave in order to conceal it.

How specific can you get? Do they have an expression for selling such flowers, or stupidly planting potatoes instead?
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 11:49 AM on October 2, 2005

One argument against strong Sapir_Worf is to observe somebody learning a language, and how they fail to become completely new, much more complex and nuanced people.
I also like Pinker's observation that nobody on learning the word "Schadenfreude" for the first time, says "oh my god, this concept is so alien my non-germanic mind cannot comprehend it", but rather something more like "you mean there's a word for that? Cool."
posted by signal at 11:59 AM on October 2, 2005

weapons-grade pandemonium : "WAR NAM NIHADAN Persian
"To murder somebody, bury their body, then grow some flowers over the grave in order to conceal it."

How specific can you get? Do they have an expression for selling such flowers, or stupidly planting potatoes instead?

CONCRETE OVERSHOES English

To murder someone by putting their feet in a bucket of cement, waiting for it to dry, and throwing them into a body of water such that they drown and their body does not float to the surface.

I guess they can get as specific as we can.
posted by Bugbread at 12:14 PM on October 2, 2005

Medical and technical terminology is also extremely specific.
posted by TwelveTwo at 12:40 PM on October 2, 2005

I bet with some careful slang research we could triple that number. Crustache? Lemmy?

i suddenly feel like i am a part of a hitherto unknown community. i thought my friends and i were the only people who ever used the term lemmy to describe a type of facial hair.
posted by bryak at 12:42 PM on October 2, 2005

Oh that's cool bugbread. Here's my picks for an hypothetic "They have a word for that?" book about English:

BEER GOGGLES
The imaginary spectacles/glasses (goggles) that one wears after an over-indulgence in alcohol (beer), and that make an otherwise unappealing person seem sexually desirable.

SHIRT
A male nightclubber whose ideal night out will be to drink excessively, make sexual advances towards women and complete the night with a drunken brawl. Invariably their attire includes a dressy shirt, often without a tie.

MOON
To reveal one's naked buttocks, usually as an insult or bawdy jest.

DRIVE-BY
The shooting of guns at a particular target from inside a car.

TRAINSPOTTER
Generally a usually intelligent but particularly anally retentive person; the person may be obsessed with trivia or have a keen interest in collecting particular objects or data, such as trainspotting, stamp collecting etc.

It's unique, untranslatable words like these that give us a very good insight into the exotic behaviour of the English species. ;)
posted by funambulist at 12:57 PM on October 2, 2005

(all taken from here)
posted by funambulist at 12:58 PM on October 2, 2005

Allow me to shed some light on at least some of the bullshit in this book. Native persian (farsi) speaker here, and neither I nor anyone else in the house have ever heard any of the words listed as persian except for "GHALIDAN" which is listed as "rolling around as lovers do" but really just plain means "to roll" without the extra romantic context.

"War nam nihadan" are THREE parsian words I've never heard before. and "Ghiqq" for the sound made by a boiling kettle? I'm not sure what transliteration scheme this dude is using but that's besides the point- since when were onomatopeoiaic words so strange? Every language has that kind of thing.

Offhand, the russian word for someone with six fingers - 'angushti za-id' sounds an awful lot like farsi for 'too many fingers'-- angoshte zi-ad.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 1:16 PM on October 2, 2005

I say we start arbitarily producing and using words as to confuse linguists of the future.

So that's what Robert Pollard has been up to all these years!
posted by joe lisboa at 2:22 PM on October 2, 2005

I also like Pinker's observation that nobody on learning the word "Schadenfreude" for the first time, says "oh my god, this concept is so alien my non-germanic mind cannot comprehend it", but rather something more like "you mean there's a word for that? Cool."

My usual response to "English has no word that means the same as the German word 'schadenfreude'" is "Well, it does now -- 'schadenfreude.'"
posted by kindall at 3:02 PM on October 2, 2005

goodnewsfortheinsane: look for "kweesten" instead of "queesting", though I don't now if it is in the present dictionaries. It's in the first 19th century edition of Van Dale's dictionary, the only one I used.

"Kweester" is "vrijer" [lover], though that still doesn't mean they were allowed anything accept talking. I think it a Northern Dutch thing, maybe even specifically Frisian. In the 19th century Frisian women were talked of as being very free/loose, because of this "kweesten", which happened openly.
posted by ijsbrand at 3:06 PM on October 2, 2005

When I saw this thread, I was terrified. Thanks for getting it off to a good start, EB (as well as for providing that excellent summary of Sapir-Whorf), and thanks to those who debunked specific "words" (I love the bad Persian attributed to Russian, and the non-Persian attributed to Persian). This kind of book depends on ignorance of both linguistics and foreign languages for its readership; unhappily, in the English-speaking countries they can pretty much count on both.
posted by languagehat at 3:13 PM on October 2, 2005

Koshatnik is my favourite. By far.
posted by flippant at 3:51 PM on October 2, 2005

Ah, thanks IJsbrand, that rings a bell. My googlagony is appeased.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 4:14 PM on October 2, 2005

re: references to the Japanese term Bakku Shen. There is an English version of this word. bobfoc, and I believe there is at least one American equivalant (butterface girl). What's interesting to me about this is that both bobfoc and butterface girl are phrases which lose all humour when translated to other languages, and are examples of phrases that will quickly die out. I suspect that many of the words in this dictionary fall into the same trap.

Also, it's interesting that we can map the popularity of new words with Google. I'm wondering if anyone will be able to roughly determine when a word stops being a fad and passes it's tipping point to become a "new word" by using google as a measuring tool.
posted by seanyboy at 4:57 PM on October 2, 2005

ha ha ha ha: Just found this...
Beerwolf : - One who wakes up in unfamiliar surroundings with torn clothes, aching limbs, the taste of blood in the mouth and nightmarish flashbacks to terrible events of the previous evening.

I love the English Language.
posted by seanyboy at 4:59 PM on October 2, 2005

One reason there's so much room for debate about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is that there's no canonical statement of what the hypothesis is.

So, for its opponents, it's the assertion that language controls thought, a position I've never heard anyone advance, but it enjoys great popularity as a straw man.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 6:23 PM on October 2, 2005

EB: "a pop variety of Sapir-Worf"

That's the thesis that speaking in Klingon makes you think like a Klingon, right?

Sorry. Anyway, here are a few excellent blog posts from an excellent cognitive science blog on the recent revival of Sapir-Whorf. One of my friends used to work in Lera Boroditsky's lab when she was at MIT. He'd tell me stories about their cool experiments, which led to me trying to follow this stuff closely. It's pretty fascinating.
posted by painquale at 7:24 PM on October 2, 2005

scheptech et al.:
There are over 30 different Chinese characters that are pronounced 'xiao', and the one the article meant is '潇'. It's a very poetic, autumny character.

The other Chinese examples provided by the article are very weak, but damned if I can think of better ones right now - and there are!
posted by of strange foe at 7:49 PM on October 2, 2005

Said PurplePorpoise:

Hmm, Ding Dong (Warning: flash) is the name of a Chinese cartoon character.

I thought Xiao Ding Dang (Hanyu Pinyin spelling) was actually Japanese?

...

English and Mandarin are my two languages. Here are some differences I've noticed:

• English has a lot of words for sarcasm/cynicism/irony/etc. So far as I know, Mandarin only has a couple.
• Mandarin has lots of words for family relationships. "Older female cousin on the father's side" 堂姐 is a strong example.
• 孝順 "Filial piety" is another one that English doesn't express very economically, especially when it's a verb. 我孝順我父母 = "I act in a filially pious way to my parents".

posted by jiawen at 8:01 PM on October 2, 2005

One word we really need in English is the Polish "ash" (can't remember the spelling, that's the pronunciation). It means "as many /much as" used as a negation.

So, one guy says "You only make $50 an hour?" and you answer "Only?! ASH $50!"
posted by Meatbomb at 8:03 PM on October 2, 2005

One word which I would love to be able to properly translate into Spanish is "parse". "Analizar" or "descifrar" just don't cut it.
posted by signal at 10:10 PM on October 2, 2005

Along these lines, I recently debated with another Wikipedia editor whether German and other languages had a word corresponding to Robert Heinlein's coinage of "grok". He posited that German had words like kennen, and English didn't have an exact corresponding word -- a point I think he's mistaken about, since we have phrases and informal metaphors that cover the same ground -- and further, that grok must then correspond to these words, an assertion which I believe misses Heinlein's entire point, that humans do not have a word for grok. I think that grok has a certain affinity with these non-English words, but I do not thing they are by any means cognates. In part his assertions show -- from the other direction -- how one can develop an opinion about a language, which its speakers will be rather surprised to hear.

The other relevance here is that the whole grok concept is based in this pop interpretation (I'm going along with this for debating purposes, though I'm not certain I believe it's substantially dissimilar) of Sapir-Whorf. Heinlein was arguing that because humans had no word for grok, we had no way of grokking -- and that learning the word, and learning to grok, went hand-in-hand. It's very sixties in that way, and I think it's a great example of the way that hypothesis crept into middlebrow thought.
posted by dhartung at 10:57 PM on October 2, 2005

I thought of another one that Mandarin doesn't seem to have that English does: 'program', in the sense of "study abroad program" or "drug recovery program". There's lots of similar things: plan, system, department... but nothing that really has the same meaning.
posted by jiawen at 1:03 AM on October 3, 2005

The article is fun, but inaccurate in places by suggesting that our fertile Mother Tongue falls short:

AKA'AKA'A Hawaiian: Skin peeling or falling off after either sunburn or heavy drinking
English equivalent: crackling

GHALIDAN Persian: Wallowing, tumbling or rolling from side to side as lovers do
English equivalent: terriwagon (from "Young Frankenstein," Transylvania Station scene)

NARACHASTRA PRAYOGA Sanskrit: Men who worship their own sexual organs
English equivalent: men

Also, the Chevy "No va" story may be apocryphal, but what isn't made-up is the original name GM (Chevy parent company) chose for its electric car. Ultimately marketed as the EV-1, it was based on a concept car called the Impact. You can't make that shit up!
posted by rob511 at 1:21 AM on October 3, 2005

What BuddhaInABucket said.
posted by Devils Slide at 4:42 AM on October 3, 2005

In regards to that Danish word that funambulist already picked apart. A fyrassistent is a lighthouse keeper, not the assistant of the lighthouse keeper. In Swedish someone in the same job is called a fyrvaktare (Lighthouse guard). The "assistance" bit in the Danish word is simply describing the person assisting the lighthouse itself. How quaint indeed.

Now, words touted by the native speakers themselves as untranslatable would be fun to see listed. The Dutch insist that no other language in the world have a gezellig (cosy, nice - used to describe good parties, great time with friends or a nice night in with a good book), while the Danes use hygge in exactly the same way (also closest translated to 'cosy' in English). Swedes insist that lagom, a unit of measurement that can't be measured, is theirs alone but I bet there's a word just like it in some other language. example: - How fast were you driving? - Lagom fast.
- How much milk do you want in your coffee? - Lagom, please.
posted by dabitch at 6:24 AM on October 3, 2005

Gezellig and hygge are indeed decently closely matched. As a Dutchman I would never claim that gezellig is somehow untranslatable; I do believe, however, that the concept is very difficult indeed to translate into English (as one specific target language). Cozy is indeed the closest alternative, but still nowhere close: for example, one might describe a night of complete debauchery as "gezellig" without anyone raising an eyebrow, but I don't think one would readily use "cozy" in such a manner.

And delmoi, I would never say that Sapir or Whorf were fascists, but rather that the strong version of S/W may be misconstrued or hijacked by people with malicious intent, as has happened before in history to science (or pseudoscience, which it effectively becomes). I should have stated that more clearly.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 6:58 AM on October 3, 2005

I thought lagom meant "just enough" or "sufficient".
posted by Devils Slide at 8:11 AM on October 3, 2005

and I thought lagom meant "balanced" or moderate."

Or is it all really just the same thing.
posted by zach4000 at 9:11 AM on October 3, 2005

A day spent in nervous anticipation of a coughing spell.

Feigned anger of a mistress.

An officer who keeps the flies off the sleeping king by waving a feather brush.

A dealer in stolen cats.

Someone who co-ordinates a group of clappers.

Accurate or not, some of these sound like they're straight out of Edward Gorey, and that's a good thing.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 9:17 AM on October 3, 2005

Devils slide, yep, lagom could indeed be sufficient but just like goodnewsfortheinsane says about gezellig being used to describe complete debauchery (much like hygge can do), lagom is more than just sufficient in 'attitude' or the way that it's used. :) This is why I think such words are far more revealing - while swedes might party (festa!) their neighbours further south use what once was simply 'cosy' to describe the same thing - and they throw much better parties. Coincidence? I think not. ;P
posted by dabitch at 10:16 AM on October 3, 2005

Gotcha, dabitch. It's a versatile word. I wonder if the meaning is dependent on the inflection, much like "dude" can have a dozen different meanings based on how it's sounded out.

...and they throw much better parties. Coincidence? I think not. ;P

Now now, lets not start a Scandinavian incident :D
posted by Devils Slide at 4:24 PM on October 3, 2005

A Svede ain't nuttin but a Norvegan vit 'is brains knocked out.

*strikes belligerent squarehead pose, waits for incident*
posted by languagehat at 5:20 PM on October 3, 2005

As someone who's one-quarter Norwegian, I second that assertion. :)
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 1:26 AM on October 4, 2005