[pjsg]

The article seems to think that a word is untranslateable if there is no single word in the target language. If I'm not misreading the article, then this is completely obvious -- just consider the number of words in English and the number of words in almost any other language, and you will find that there are more English words than the other language. It is now clear that there exist English words that don't correspond to a single word in the other language.

[ErroneousBosh]

> It is now clear that there exist English words that don't correspond to a single word in the other language.

But that's true of any language. Not only that, but English uses loanwords heavily which are often Anglicisations of words from other languages, which may not in themselves be just one word.

"Ho ho ho", the flag-waving Little Englander types say, "Gaelic is such a stupid language, they don't even have a word for 'television', they just say 'television' in a stupid accent!"

But English also has no word for "television". Worse, the word "television" isn't even just a loanword, it's two words from two different languages, "tele" from Greek and "vision" from Latin. What a bodge job! Imagine letting something like that slip through to production use!

The hypothetical Catalan-Hungarian inventor of it in another leg of the trousers of time may have called it llunylátás, and then where would we be?

Well, most languages would have some variant of that word to mean "television", as they do now, I expect.

The English word "galore" (meaning "sufficient" shading towards "more than enough") comes from the Gaelic words "gu leòr", (goo lyaawr, the grave accent above the o makes the vowel sound longer). What a silly language English is, doesn't have a word that means "more than you're ever likely to need", has to steal one from Gaelic and then spell it wrong.

Oh, they use this word "whisky". You know what that means? It means "uisge beatha" but they only say the first word, in a silly accent because they can't pronounce it properly.

Quite often there's no single word for a thing you're trying to translate but that doesn't mean it's untranslateable. English has only one single word for rain, for example, but Gaelic has about half a dozen of which the only ones I can reproduce here are "uisge" (that word again) which just means "water", and "fras" which is more like a gentle shower. The rest of the words in the Gaelic of the North-West of Scotland that refer to rainy weather are, of course, profane in the extreme.

[mcswell]

"English also has no word for "television" Oh goodness sake. OF COURSE English has a word "television". The fact that you can trace its etymology back to Greek and Latin doesn't mean it's not an English word. If you confronted a native speaker of Latin who also spoke Greek (a common situation back then, also vice versa), they would have no clue what "television" meant any more than most people would know what a "Fernseher" is.

[anthk]

He would know both tele and vision. Remote viewng? Some kind of magic?

[card_zero]

I found the word τηλαυγής (telauges), "far-shining", meaning "visible from far away". Like a lighthouse. So some theoretical ancient might hear "television" and understand it as "looking at distant landmarks".

[mcswell]

Might think it referred to someone with good distance vision (not myopic).

[nandomrumber]

Your comment is silly, but I can play along.

English people will say something like: Germans have a word for everything.

Many of which are just sentences with the spaces removed.

Australia’s have a lot of those too, or worse: our speech is often nothing but a handful of vowels and a swarm of apostrophes.

[ErroneousBosh]

> Australia’s have a lot of those too, or worse: our speech is often nothing but a handful of vowels and a swarm of apostrophes.

VLIW natural language.

[nandomrumber]

I love it!

[KPGv2]

Now here's where it gets interesting: there is no agreed-upon definition among experts what a word is. So there's no point in arguing about it if the thing we're arguing about doesn't even have a rigorous definition.

[opello]

Enter: the morpheme

[realusername]

Not to mention that the English dictionary is stuffed with legacy words that no natives understand. Is it even part of the language if no native use it? It's another debate.

[nyeah]

It's stuffed with unusual and rare words, and no native speaker understands all of those.

But I think most of those words are in use somewhere, for something.

[plumeria]

Is there any overlap between these unusual and rare words and GRE vocabulary?

[davidgay]

The GRE vocabulary is actually based on French, Latin and Greek, not English. Much less rare and unusual once you realise that.

[mmmBacon]

This is 100% incorrect as you’ve written it. The GRE is based on English vocabulary. It’s true that many words have Greek, Latin, or French roots but they are most certainly not Latin, Greek, or French.

[nkrisc]

The English word for “television” is television.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Does no-one else use the english word "telly" for a television?

[mmmBacon]

Isn’t “telly” English slang for television? It’s a regional slang that’s not universally used.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Slang? Possibly, but you can go anywhere in the UK and ask "What's on the telly tonight?" and people know what you're asking. I'd claim that it's informal rather than regional slang. There's even an L.A. company using it as their name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telly_(company)

(I was addressing the parent's claim of 'But English also has no word for "television"')

[mmmBacon]

Yep you provide a great example of a word used as regional slang for the word television.

The word telly is not in common usage in the United States. It’s understood here to be UK slang for TV.

Your example is largely irrelevant; I wouldn’t call a spyware TV founded by Russian born dude a cultural touchstone.

Regardless of origin the word television is an English word now. The ability to adopt loan words from other languages is one of the many reasons English usage is so widespread.

[xigoi]

I’ve seen a lot of weird takes on the internet, but “English has no word for television” takes the crown.

[rcxdude]

I think it's meant to demonstrate how 'gaelic has no word for television' is a dumb statement.

[ErroneousBosh]

Do you really not know what that statement means?

[drivebyhooting]

That isn’t a proof. Synonyms can bolster the enumeration sans augmenting novelty.

[nyeah]

It kind of is a proof if we assume that single words can be translated at all. Translate a single word from Language X (more words) to language Y (fewer words) and back. I can't uniquely recover all the words in Language X that way.

[drivebyhooting]

Does translation have to be a bijection? I don’t think so.

[nyeah]

I don't know about that. For many practical purposes probably not?

I'm just on the thread following this idea: "The article seems to think that a word is untranslateable if there is no single word in the target language"

So we're talking about "translatability" of single words. Mapping multiple words of language X to one word of language Y is going to have some effect on translation.

[plumeria]

Nope, because of synonyms as well.

[manwe150]

That is the crux of the article premise: each synonym conveys similar denotations (principle component is I think what the article called it), but usually with some difference in connotations (the off axis contributions). You can nudge the languages vectors towards each other by adding enough synonyms and modifiers together, but they are always a little bit off even still

[nomel]

So, really, this can be simplified to the question "can written text fully convey all human concepts", some of which having labels in only some languages, which is an obvious "no".

[sjducb]

Synonyms rarely have identical meanings for example:

Happy: Joyful, cheerful, merry, delighted

Or

Beautiful: Lovely, pretty, attractive

The only truly identical synonym I can think of is flammable and inflammable

[Izkata]

I thought there was a difference between those two in how they start burning, like one needs an external flame to start while the other can burst into flame without an obvious ignition source.

[drivebyhooting]

Perhaps perhaps.

But what joyful means to you likely differs from what it means to me, simply because we haven’t read the exact same literature and had the same conversations.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

True true.

[mannykannot]

True, but many languages now have words that were absent from their earlier vocabularies. Shakespeare did not have the option to use 'telephone', 'semiconductor' or 'entropy'.

[James_K]

I think the reasonable reader will conclude it's unlikely for any two languages to share exactly the same vocabulary, accounting for synonyms.

[seanhunter]

Not sure this approach really accounts for the difference between a language like German where you have one compound word for a concept that would require multiple words in English. For one good example, the German "Nomenkompositum" is "compound noun" in English.

[bloppe]

Some giant portion of English vocabulary actually are compound words. English loves using compound words but only if the roots are sourced from Latin or Greek: words like electrocardiogram ("electronic heart picture", sourced from Greek), agriculture ("field nurturing", from Latin), and telecommunication ("far sharing", a hybrid of Latin and Greek roots). Probably the overwhelming majority of the words in an English dictionary will be compound words, and people regularly coin neologisms ("new words") using this formula.

An English speaker might be willing to accept componoma ("names placed together", Latin) or synthetonoma (also "names placed together", Greek) without breaking stride.

[thaumasiotes]

> English loves using compound words but only if the roots are sourced from Latin or Greek: words like electrocardiogram

This is false; English loves using compound words. One example of such a compound word is "fire department", which has identical syntax to the German compound "Feuerwehr". Whether a compound word is spelled with or without internal spaces is not a fact about the language, it's a fact about the spelling.

[bloppe]

You'd call it a noun phrase, not a compound word. Definitely splitting hairs at this point, but hey that's what gets me off.

[aitchnyu]

A couple of ape cubs who learned sign language saw a duck and invented "waterbird". We have to know two dead languages to know if aquaplaning or hydroplaning is the right word.

[jleyank]

Language while involved in that water related process is probably drawn from Anglo-Saxon or possibly Old Norse. No refined Mediterranean stuff.

[seanhunter]

I wasn’t saying there are no compound nouns in English at all. If you count portmanteau words like “Brexit” and jargon there are a massive abundance of them. All I was saying is the approach would count certain concepts as untranslatable when they clearly aren’t, simply because in one language you have a compound word and in the other language you use several words to express the same concept. It’s definitely not untranslatable but the translation function isn’t one to one.

[bloppe]

I think your point basically asks the question "what counts as a word" because clearly German has infinitely more "words" than would ever appear individually in a dictionary. I'm saying that English does, too.

[swsieber]

What sticks out to me is that the first word in these ends with a vowel so they don't sound like compound words.

[suddenlybananas]

That's just a difference in orthography. English could easily have had an orthographic standard where we write "compoundnoun" for compounds. This is in contrast with a language like French, where compound nouns are relatively rare. Compare English "Olive oil" and German "Olivenöl" with French "huile d'olive". In French you need to have a preposition to combine the two nouns, whereas English and German do noun-noun composition.

[adrian_b]

You are right but neither yours nor those of the previous posters are good examples of compound nouns.

These examples have just the meanings of a noun + adjective or of a noun + noun in genitive case, where some languages are lazier than others and omit the markers of case or of adjectival derivation from noun, which are needed in more strict languages.

There are also other kinds of compound nouns, where the compound noun does not have the meaning of its component words, but only some related meaning (usually either a pars pro toto meaning or a metaphorical meaning). Those are true compound nouns, not just abbreviated sequences of words from which the grammatical markers have been omitted.

Such compound words were very frequent in Ancient Greek, from where they have been inherited in the scientific and technical language, where they have been used to create names for new things and concepts, e.g. arthropod, television, phonograph, basketball, "bullet train" and so on.

This kind of compound words are almost never translatable, but they are frequently borrowed from one language to another and during the borrowing process sometimes the component words are translated, but the result is not a translated word, it is a new word that is added to the destination language.

[seanhunter]

> There are also other kinds of compound nouns, where the compound noun does not have the meaning of its component words, but only some related meaning (usually either a pars pro toto meaning or a metaphorical meaning)

The example that people often quote from German is “kummerspeck” which would literally translate as “grief bacon”, but means weight you put on through comfort eating having gone through a bereavement or other trauma.

[opello]

> There are also other kinds of compound nouns, where the compound noun does not have the meaning of its component words

Wouldn't cranberry morphemes be good examples this type of relationship? I don't know if, in the eponymous example, the cran- being bound precludes it from being counted as a closed compound word or not though.

[z500]

If you ignore the spaces, the only real difference between German and English compound nouns are the infixes between elements to show bracketing. Case in point: Nomenkompositum

[mcswell]

It's the same structure in both languages. Just because it's written as if it were a single unbreakable word doesn't mean it is--or contrariwise, the fact that it's written as two things with a space in between doesn't mean that it's two "words" in English. The problem lies in the meaning of "word." Is 'doghouse' one word in English, while 'dog house' is two? No.

[bpt3]

You're correct.

In another blog post where he uses "shibui" as an example of an untranslatable word, he says, "Saying shibui like that, in a mere second, conveys what would otherwise make a clunky and unnecessarily long digression."

At the root of nearly all the blog posts like this one (basically explaining why they don't agree with a widely held belief) is a redefinition of a term or word into something very specific that contradicts the common definition.

[bloak]

But perhaps all languages have a countably infinite number of words, in which case that proof doesn't work. (In English we have: legless, leglessness, leglessnessless, leglessnesslessness, ... It's not a great example, but it's good enough.)

Even if the number of words in a language were finite we wouldn't have a reasonable way of counting them. There are too many kinds of fuzziness involved in deciding what counts as a "word" and you can't ignore the borderline cases because the borderline cases vastly outnumber the straightforward cases.

[crazygringo]

> and you will find that there are more English words than the other language. It is now clear that there exist English words that don't correspond to a single word in the other language.

You're forgetting about synonyms. The common adage that English has the largest vocabulary stems from the fact that it often has multiple words for the same thing. Sofa, couch. Autumn, fall. Etc etc. Other languages generally don't do this. I've never heard anyone suggest that English has words for more concepts.

[dodobirdlord]

There are relatively few cases of true synonyms in English (or any language). There are subtle differences in meaning, register, etc that are recognized by native speakers.

[crazygringo]

I don't what you mean by a "true" synonym, but that is false. There are historical reasons there is a lot of word-doubling. The fact that synonyms might carry additional subtle connotations -- i.e. maybe you find "autumn" more poetic than "fall" -- doesn't change the fact that they are synonyms.

[hansvm]

One of the main points of language is to evoke ideas in others' minds. "Autumn" and "fall" will normally evoke different ideas in US english (the former bringing about views of the cozier parts of the season, and the latter being more sterile, used to refer to a particular region of time). Maybe we disagree about what a "true synonym" is, but that distinction seems important to me.

[crazygringo]

Then by your logic no words can be true synonyms, because sounds themselves inherently evoke meaning [1]. And then the concept itself becomes pointless.

So I'd prefer to stick to concepts that actually do mean something, where "synonym" is two words that have the same primary functional meaning. Splitting hairs over whether autumn is "cozier" than fall does not change the fact that they are synonyms by any reasonable definition, or change the point that English has a hugely larger number of synonyms than any other language, for certain historical reasons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

[kayodelycaon]

Sofa and couch are only interchangeable in some contexts. They are different “flavors” of similar ideas.

This becomes immediately apparent (and relevant) when writing fiction or poetry. At least it does to me.

Non-fiction and spoken English do not highlight the subtleties between these words because using them interchangeably in the same work is considered bad form.

[mcswell]

"...there are more English words than the other language" There might be more words in some English dictionaries than in some dictionaries of other languages, but that may just be due to a lot more effort having gone into English lexicography than X language lexicography. I doubt that most native speakers of English know more English words than equally educated native speakers of some other language know words of their language.

[naijaboiler]

I think he’s rather arguing that no language is perfectly translatable to another. He only uses “untranslatable word” an instance of that claim

[godelski]

There's a real irony that the examples are coming from Japanese since it is an agglutinative language.

I think people don't realize how weird language is. Like you could look at Chinese and call each sentence a "word" as there are no spaces. What's the difference between that and a compound word like "nighttime" or the whole German language where you got words like Krankenwagen ("patient" + "car").

Now this doesn't mean there aren't words or phrases that aren't translatable. But the thing is we can always translate the words themselves. What we can't always translate is the meaning behind them. I think the best example of this comes from Star Trek and the Tamarian Language[0,1]. "Sokath, his eyes open!" The problem with communication is not that the words don't translate, it is that the meaning behind them doesn't. Just as people struggle with idioms when learning American English or why someone might be confused about why someone "shit in the milk" or "fucked the dog". Words are an embedding. A compression.

The thing people are constantly forgetting, but is more important than ever in a globally connected world, is that words are not perfect representations of thoughts. We compress our thoughts into them and hope the person on the other side can decompress them. It is why you can more easily communicate with your close friends who have better context than you can with another person that natively speaks your language and is why someone that learns a new language can speak perfectly well but still struggle to communicate. Language is not just words, it is culture[2]. So in a much more connected world today we have these disconnects in culture and thus interpretation of what people say. I know every one of you has been told to "speak to your audience" but how do you speak to your audience when your audience is everybody and when you don't know who your audience is? The new paradigm requires us to be much better interpreters than we were before. Least everyone is going to sound crazy, other than those you frequently talk to and have that shared understanding.

[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tamarian_language

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-wzr74d7TI

[2] This is, btw, why people argue for embodied AI being so critical. Not because LLMs can't appear to grasp the language, but because we as humans have embodied our language so deeply you probably didn't even realize that I used the word "grasp" to refer to an abstract concept and not something you can actually touch with your hand.

[cortesoft]

Yeah, I was interpreting 'untranslatable' to mean what it says, but they meant 'untranslatable with only a couple words', which is a very different claim.