I’ve often heard of other languages that have words for which there is no English equivalent. Articles about them usually imply that these other languages are so much more expressive, or that English is in some way inferior because of it. I’ve always found that interesting, and it got me thinking… surely English has some words that don’t have a direct translation (at least not in every language)?
Of course, to be aware of these, I think you would have to be a native speaker of a foreign language who also knows English pretty well. I think the Dope has a number of people who fit that description.
So, does anyone know any English words that don’t translate into another language?
There are quite a few words in English that don’t translate well in Russian. Of course, Russians just use the English words then (transliterated into Cyrillic).
Something like “image” (in the PR sense of the word). No equivalent in Russian. So to convey the meaning they use “имидж” which is just the transliteration.
Same with “teenager”, “brand”, “businessman”, “offshoring”, “holding” (as in “stock holding company”), “futures”, “realtor”, “dealer”, “broker”…
You can see that most of these have to do with “capitalism” :). Guess the short time since capitalism was introduced in Russia after the Soviet times is not enough for original Russian word formation.
Step-father and father-in-law are both beau-père in french, so while there is a french word you can translate step-father and father-in-law into you lose some of the specificity of meaning.
This is utter nonsense. English is usually considered to have a larger vocabulary than any other language so it is literally impossible that other languages can be more expressive because they have more words. And the only reason that any words exist in a language that are not shared by many is an accident of history, that somebody at some time decided to coin a word and others didn’t. Nor does it matter, either. A word can always be translated by a phrase if there is no direct equivalent. All words in every language are descended from other words in earlier languages. The exact pathway and the splitting of meanings say nothing about the expressiveness or superiority of a language. Things just happen.
As famously said, when we want to express ourselves with some foreign word, we will steal it. Viola! It’s now English. More or less, that is, but that’s close enough for us. And I’d like some more of that quesadilla, while you’re up.
It’s really not all that odd, and it does not mean that one language is more expressive than another. Here’s a pair of examples from a pair of closely related dialects:
The word “biscuit” in American English has no one-word equivalent in British English.
The word “biscuit” in British English has no one-word equivalent in American English.
Given that it’s a two-way non-equivalance, you can’t possibly argue that one of those dialects is more expressive than the other.
Being as English has a larger vocabulary than most other languages, it’s almost mathematically guaranteed that in a one-to-one comparison with any other language, you’re going to find words in English that don’t have an equivalent word in the other language.
As far as I understand not true. According to a linguist I heard on the radio it’s impossible to say how many words a language has and which language has most of them.
A good thing you put “almost” as of course many words share meaning or are archaic. I would think it’s pretty difficult to say which language is more expressive even if we could definitively say how many words they contain.
Not quite, as Brits also use the word cookie.
If you were to hold up everything that a Brit calls a biscuit, Americans would call them cookies. However, if you were to hold up everything an American calls a cookie, Brits would call some of them biscuits and some of them cookies.
I don’t actually know what the American biscuit means.
I’d argue that while some Americans might call a scone a biscuit, that’s not the first thing that comes to mind when an American says biscuit.
This is an American biscuit. While there is some similarity to a scone, it’s lighter and fluffier in texture and generally has only flour in it, not bits of other stuff like scones (in my limited experience) usually have. American biscuits tend to have a more crumbly texture and scones tend to be more flaky.
I’m sure the linguist can build an interesting argument but the English language is by far the most comprehensive language on the planet. That is because it is a bastard tongue built from velcro which tenaciously grasps any foreign wod which drifts by more than once.
English has about 100,000 quasi-common words and the Oxford English Dictionary lists 500,000 which are all traceable is usage. But wait - there’s more! There are at least another 500,000 of specialised but widely used words in medicine, zoology, physics, astronomy, microbiology, necromancy etc etc. And then there is Leet. And Pirate Talk the most dastardly of 'em all.
Exactly. Here are some of my favorite examples, from English and Hebrew:
In English:
“hand” is unambiguous, meaning exactly the portion from wrist to fingers.
“arm” is ambiguous, meaning either the entire limb, OR the portion from write to shoulder
In Hebrew:
“yad” is ambiguous, meaning either the portion from wrist to fingers, OR the entire limb
“zroa” is unambiguous, meaning only the upper portion near the shoulder.
None of these words maintains the same clarity and range of meaning in the other language:
Another example:
There is no part of a person’s body which is called a “lap” in English. A lap does not exist unless a person is in a sitting position, in which case his lap is not a part of his body, but is rather the empty airspace above his upper legs. It could be argued that one’s lap is the surface of the upper legs, but it is certainly not the legs themselves.
There is no word for this space in Hebrew, but Hebrew does have a word for a very similar sort of space: chayk (chet-yud-kuf). A chayk does not exist unless a person has his arms extended in front of him, and then his chayk is the empty airspace between the arms.
English does not have a word for chayk. Some translators have tried breast or bosom, but those are actual body parts. Or, they are ambiguous, referring either to the body part or the empty space.
In other words, English has a word for the empty space above one’s crotch, while Hebrew has a word for the empty space between one’s arms. Is one more expressive than the other? I don’t think so.
