words that don't exist in English

[Benjamin Barrett]

Hmmm. I found all of the Japanese examples to be excellent. That isn't to say that the parts of speech match, but the translations are really good. Arigata-meiwaku, honne and tatemae are three of my favorite Japanese words. I asked a native speaker about the Korean, and he agreed with it. The German "Schadenfreude" seems perhaps slightly narrower than the actual meaning, but still the translation seems basically accurate.

I cannot vouch for the Russian, though.

Benamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

On May 18, 2012, at 8:05 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

>
> 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.

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