Why would Russian need a word for “the seller of dead cats”?
(Background, Toronto Star article October 1/05:
Been tingoed lately?
New book celebrates words and phrases from around the world that have no English equivalent
Ours is a rich and inventive language, but you can’t help feeling maybe we’re missing out
LYNDA HURST
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein may have said it best: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
Rich and ever-mutating the English language may be, but often it lacks the mot juste. And oh, the frustration, when you can’t put a name to objects or experiences because the word for them simply doesn’t exist.
Granted, somebody a while back finally tracked down the word for that space between your nose and upper lip — the philtrum — but English, for all its Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norman and Germanic roots, is missing out on a multitude of others.
You know when you laugh so hard one side of your abdomen hurts? Of course you do. But what’s the word for it? No?
The Japanese neatly call it katahara itai.
Or what about the guilt-ridden husband who buys a present for his wife? Sort of like a kiss-and-make-up gift, but not really because there wasn’t a fight between them just his misbehaviour which she found out about?
In English, it takes 27 words to say what you mean. German, most surprisingly, does it in one: drachenfutter. Okay, it literally translates as “dragon fodder,” but it serves the purpose in context.
In fact, German’s propensity for compound words is a boon for writers. Kummerspeck literally means “grief bacon,” but is used when someone gains weight from emotional overeating.
Then there’s backpfeifengesicht, for a face that cries out to be punched.
Skimmed any stones across water lately? In Dutch, you’d be plimpplamppletteren.
Fed up with the neko-neko at the office? It’s Indonesian for the person whose ideas only make things worse.
English can certainly describe each phenomenon, but for all its 650,000-word vocabulary, it hasn’t a clue what to call them.
The examples come from a book that has yet to be released in Canada called The Meaning of Tingo, by BBC researcher Adam Jacot de Boinod. After trawling the dictionaries of 154 of the world’s languages, he maintains that a country’s lingo tells more about its culture, even its economy, than any travel guide.
Like the Inuit and their myriad words for snow, Albanians apparently have an obsession with facial hair: 27 words for mustaches — hanging up, hanging down, bushy, thin, pointed, et al. — and another 27 for eyebrows. Not to be outdone, Hawaiians have 47 words for bananas, while Argentinian gauchos use 80 to 100 different words for horses.
“What I’m trying to do is celebrate the joy of foreign words,” says de Boinod. “While English is a great language, one shouldn’t be surprised there are many others having, as they do, words with no English equivalent.”
He thinks English should incorporate more than it does. The wonderful Italian word for someone tanned by sun lamp, slampadato, for example. Or the Russian word for that feeling one has for a former lover no longer loved: razbliuto.
But what of koshatnik, Russian for seller of dead cats, or cigerci, Turkish for a seller of liver and lungs?
Perhaps not those two — not when finding a name for something is a way of conjuring its existence. Which is what translators spend their lives doing.
(long part of article removed here).
An invaluable word on Easter Island, it means, as Adam Jacot de Boinod explains, “to borrow objects one by one from a friend’s house until nothing is left.”)