[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.

[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.

[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.

[nkrisc]

The English word for “television” is television.

[ndsipa_pomu]

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

[xigoi]

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

[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.

[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

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.