words that don't exist in English

[Ben Zimmer]

On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 11:05 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
> >
> > This seems to be a popular stupid thing to do:
> >
> > http://thegloss.com/culture/10-awesome-words-we-dont-have-in-english-574/
>
> 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.

And similarly, the Indonesian slang word "jayus" (an adjective, not a
noun), is used to describe unfunny jokes, approximated in English
fairly well with "lame" or "corny". I wrote about how unreliable the
glosses are in these lists of "untranslatable" words on Language Log
back in '05, and you still see many of the same misleading examples
trotted out:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002500.html

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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