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21 Emotions with No English words

 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room Post Reply
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iguanamon
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 Message 1 of 18
09 January 2013 at 3:58pm | IP Logged 
This came in on my twitter feed today: 21 Emotions For Which There Are No English Words and I thought it might be interesting to share with the community.

Excerpt:
POPSCI.com wrote:
Few of us use all--or even most--of the 3,000 English-language words available to us for describing our emotions, but even if we did, most of us would still experience feelings for which there are, apparently, no words.

In some cases, though, words do exist to describe those nameless emotions--they're just not English words. Which is a shame, because--as today's infographic by design student Pei-Ying Lin demonstrates, they often define a feeling entirely familiar to us.

Lin solicited the list of "unspeakable" words from colleagues at London's Royal College of Art, and found that their definitions in English usually came down to something like, "it is a kind of (emotion A), close to (emotion B), and somehow between (emotion C) and (emotion D)."

Next, to visualize the relationship between the foreign emotion-words and English ones, Lin used a linguistics model to map out five basic emotions (large yellow circles), along with several descriptive words related to each (smaller green circles). Finally, she used her sources' descriptions to place the new/foreign words on the English map (click on images to zoom)


It's definitely worth a click. I'd post the image but I can't, it is an interactive one. Fascinating.

Edited by iguanamon on 09 January 2013 at 5:50pm

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Tsopivo
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 Message 2 of 18
09 January 2013 at 5:04pm | IP Logged 
I also enjoyed the link in the article to the list of 25 words that exist in other languages and that you wish existed in English. Especially :

1 Age-otori (Japanese): To look worse after a haircut

2 Arigata-meiwaku (Japanese): An act someone does for you that you didn’t want to have them do and tried to avoid having them do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favor, and then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social conventions required you to express gratitude

And this one needs to be mentioned on this forum :

25 Yoko meshi (Japanese): literally ‘a meal eaten sideways,’ referring to the peculiar stress induced by speaking a foreign language
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ling
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 Message 3 of 18
09 January 2013 at 7:16pm | IP Logged 
I'm surprised to see 加油 there. It's not an emotion; it's just a cheer, like "You can do
it!" or "Keep it up!" (or at the horse races: "Go baby go!")

And I always thought 心疼 was just "heartache".
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druckfehler
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 Message 4 of 18
15 January 2013 at 8:39pm | IP Logged 
I immediately thought of Saudade (Portuguese) and 정 (Korean) and was glad to find both in the graphic. Seems to be very well done and was interesting to read. Thanks for sharing!
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ennime
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universityofbrokengl
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 Message 5 of 18
15 January 2013 at 10:00pm | IP Logged 
Gezellig is on there! ^_^ we used to make so much fun about that in Amsterdam when I was hanging with expats.
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vilas
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 Message 6 of 18
16 January 2013 at 12:04pm | IP Logged 
There is a nice book called "The meaning of Tingo" with all the words that don't have a specific translation in English (not only emotions but also emotions)

http://themeaningoftingo.blogspot.be/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Jacot_de_Boinod
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kaptengröt
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 Message 7 of 18
18 January 2013 at 7:40am | IP Logged 
I think this is nicer than these ones that are like "all these things we can't say in English!!" because on those, they never take into account that we can say them perfectly fine in English (just in multiple words or with some description), or that the language they are showing us actually is writing them in multiple words/description and they just don't ex. have spaces between them (like with compound words and agglutinating languages). Like claiming the compound "thinice" in a language is special because in that language they just have no space in-between, whereas we do in English...

Schadenfreude - Wait, doesn't this sort of count as being in English? Since we do use the German word for it (not any different from all the other words we've borrowed from other languages). The other ones I can see why they are on there, since we don't use them in English. This one at least, also has a list of "English words that mean the same or almost the same thing" in Wikipedia.

Hygge has always been weird to me. Probably they use it differently in Danish, but I have not yet actually been able to figure out when exactly you couldn't just replace it with "cozy" ("homey" I personally think is included in the meaning of cozy).

"The feeling of obsession with someone or something", isn't that... just... obsession? I'm a little confused. You say "I am obsessed (with/by...)". Then again these things are not usually so good at very clearly describing the words.

"Identifying with other's suffering so much that the heart hurts". I think that is covered in "empathy", just that empathy is a little less specific and can be used for any emotion technically...

"A rather relaxed attitude and emotion towards everything..." isn't that one "laid-back"?

"The feeling of slight laziness..." sounds like how I always use lethargy, but otherwise I think the problem there is more the same as with empathy - it's covered in the meaning of "lazy" already, it's just less specific. Actually I use "lazy" to mean exactly this sort of "slight laziness", whereas I would use "really/extremely lazy" to mean something worse than that.

I think the internet ones are funny, I didn't realize we don't have words for those because to me it just seems like common sense to describe the feeling instead of reach for a single word. Although I don't understand the Twitter one, since I don't use Twitter.
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Medulin
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 Message 8 of 18
18 January 2013 at 8:48pm | IP Logged 
Saudade is said AÑORANZA or MORRIÑA in Spanish, and ČEŽNJA in Croatian, and Serbian, SEVDAH in Bosnian.


Homesickness qualifies for a word in English, and, thus, you can argue,
many languages lack a word for Homesickness and have to use 3 words instead of a compound.


There's one word we have in Croatian, but I haven't been able to find it in other languages:
ZLOPAMTILO: a person who only remembers bad things, or bad things someone else did or said.

Edited by Medulin on 18 January 2013 at 9:00pm



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