words that don't exist in English

[Wilson Gray]

On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: words that don't exist in English
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This seems to be a popular stupid thing to do:
>
> http://thegloss.com/culture/10-awesome-words-we-dont-have-in-english-574/
>
> Â  Â  VS-)
>

The translations are so random that the examples work only if you have
no knowledge at all of the language cited. E.g. the meaning of the
Russian *noun* - *not* verb - _toska_ is pretty much covered in
English by "the blues" - the emotion, not the musical genre.

OTOH, how easy is it to distinguish

"he came _to_ me with a knife"

from

"he came _at_ me with a knife"

in other languages?

And the englishing of Russian

"on zhdal, no ne dozhdalsia"

always brings a smile to my face, because it's so, IMO, *weird*!

"he waited, but he did not complete [his] act of waiting (very
approximately)" =

"he waited, but the person that he was waiting for didn't come" / "…
the event that he was waiting for didn't occur"

or something like that.

It's impossible, IMO, to borrow the Russian into English or even to
calque it, but,

Youneverknow.

Someone more fluent in Russian may be able to work something out or to
provide a translation that better captures the _Gefuehl_ of the
Russian.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org