I love these words, and I love it that they can't be translated by a single English word or short phrase.
20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World:
But it's not quite true to say that they are "examples of instances where other languages have found the right word and English simply falls speechless." After all, they each have a short 'definition' in English. So English doesn't fall speechless (especially as 'tartle' is a word from an English dialect!). Merely has to be a bit more prolix. This is important because we don't want to fall into strong linguistic determinism, do we?
30 October 2010
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