I have a habit, and you’ll see why. Every so often I open a tab and search for strange words in some language I half-know or don’t know at all. Hindi, Japanese, Welsh, Korean, Portuguese... Words that other languages have and English doesn’t. Or even better – nobody doesn’t. Untranslatable words, the lists call them, though that’s a slight cheat: usually they translate fine, just not into a single word, and not without losing something.
The habit started, oddly, with English.
Try translating fair play into Russian. You can’t, exactly. There are approximations, like честная игра, literally “honest play”, but native speakers will tell you it doesn’t carry what fair play carries. So Russian did what most languages did: it just took the English phrase. The French did the same: fair-play. The Germans wrote it without a hyphen and capitalized the F, because German: Fair Play. Italian, Spanish, Polish, Japanese, Turkish - they all imported it more or less intact. The phrase travelled the way English exports tend to: not through translation, but by simply moving in.
Which raises a small puzzle. Why didn’t they translate it? The words honest and play exist in every one of those languages. The components are available. What was missing was the cultural object the phrase points at - the specifically English idea that there are rules of conduct in competition that are themselves more important than winning, and that violating them is a kind of failure even when you win. That’s not a translation problem. That’s a missing concept
Once you notice this, you start seeing it everywhere. Some words travel by translation; some travel by import. Some don’t travel at all. And every language has things that the others would have to import, paraphrase, or simply do without.
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Take Italian magari. I don’t speak Italian, but the word is the kind of thing my habit hands me: a single syllable carrying four feelings English would have to choose between.
Ask an Italian friend: are you going on holiday this summer? She might answer, with a small shrug: magari. That single word means, simultaneously: I wish. Maybe. If only. Hopefully. Probably not. The shrug doesn’t disambiguate, because the word doesn’t ask to. The whole point of magari is that you can hold all four meanings in suspension and let the listener decide how seriously to take the wish.
English wants you to commit. Maybe is neutral. Hopefully is forward-leaning. I wish is committed. Each of these is a different speech act with a different emotional posture. Italian lets you make all of them at once and lets the ambiguity be the meaning. The word’s etymology is even better: magari descends from Greek makários, blessed. A word for divine blessing has drifted across two thousand years into a shrug that means I wish but probably not. Languages do this kind of thing constantly, and most speakers never notice.
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Portuguese has desabafar. Literally, to un-stifle. To release pressure by speaking. English has to vent, but vent is slightly negative, slightly performative; it implies anger or complaint, an excess being expelled. Desabafar is warmer and more neutral. It can be sad, joyful, anxious, or simply too-long-held. The Portuguese word names the bodily metaphor explicitly: something compressed inside you is being un-stifled. The relief is built into the etymology.
Norwegian has utepils. Literally, outside-pilsner. But not just any beer drunk outside, but specifically the first beer of the year drunk outdoors in spring sunlight, the day the weather has finally turned warm enough to sit out again. After six months of darkness, the temperature climbs to fifteen degrees C on a Saturday afternoon, you walk to a café, you order a beer, you sit on the wooden bench in the sun. Your first utepils. Norwegians post photos of theirs every spring. The word marks an annual rite that English-speaking countries with similar climates also have but (to my knowledge) never named, which means each instance feels personal and unmarked instead of part of a thing everyone is doing.
Dutch has uitwaaien. To out-wind oneself. To go outside in windy weather specifically to clear your head: a walk along the coast, on a beach, against the gusts, with the deliberate purpose of being aired out. The Dutch have lived with wind for centuries, and out of that long relationship they made a verb. You don’t go for a walk in English; in Dutch, you uitwaai. Action and purpose fused into one word. The literal compound (out-wind) is itself beautiful in a way translation flattens.
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Here is a true story. Twenty-five years ago, in Russia, I was talking with two American friends, Donny and Bob, who’d been living there ten years. Both of them spoke Russian fluently, C1 level, near-native. Both of them were also non-drinkers, which becomes important.
I quoted them a Russian proverb-like saying about vodka: Две бутылки много, а три мало. Two bottles is too much, and three is not enough.
They didn’t believe me.
They thought I’d misremembered. Surely it was the other way around: two bottles is not enough, three is too much? That made sense. The other way didn’t. We argued about it for half an hour. They were both fluent, more than enough to discuss the grammar with confidence, and the grammar was unambiguous: two is too much, three is not enough. They knew what the words meant. They just couldn’t accept that the saying could mean what it said.
What they were missing wasn’t language. It was an experience. A Russian “troika”, three friends drinking together, sets out, perhaps a little reluctantly, intending to share a bottle or two over the course of an evening. Two bottles between three people is, by any sober calculation, more than enough. It’s a lot. You’d never start with the intention of finishing two. But once you’re three bottles in (once the conversation has reached that strange clarity where everything matters and the world finally makes sense) you are not finished. You are barely warm. Three is not enough. The saying captures the difference between what you imagine before you start and what you discover once you’re inside the experience. My non-drinking American friends, with their excellent Russian, had no access to the inside of that experience, so the words pointed at nothing they could see.
This is the part of language untranslatability lists rarely capture. It’s not just that some words don’t have equivalents. It’s that some sentences refuse to make sense unless you’ve lived the thing they describe. You can speak a language perfectly and still be locked out of half its meanings.
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Here is the strangest example I know.
In Tagalog, there is a word, gigil, that names the overwhelming bodily urge to squeeze something cute. The puppy, the baby, the partner you can’t quite handle the affection toward - gigil is what you feel when intense fondness demands a body to move. Filipinos use it constantly, the way English speakers might say “I can’t even.”
In conversational Armenian, there is a word that sounds almost identical: jijil. But it doesn’t mean what gigil means. It names something else entirely: not a feeling, but a small two-person social transaction, complete with its own grammar.
Two children at school. One has an ice cream. The other has none. The first child holds it up, smiles, and says: JIJIL! — meaning, roughly, look what I have that you don’t. The other child, in Armenian, “falls into jijil”, which is the longing the wanter feels. And the first child has done what Armenian calls “to throw someone into jijil”. The language has named not only the feeling but the act of provoking it, with separate grammatical roles for the thrower and the fallen. Intonations also differ depending upon which role the speaker holds.
Tagalog and Armenian are 5,000+ miles apart. Armenian belongs to the Indo-European family; the same family as English, Russian, Hindi, Greek. Tagalog belongs to Austronesian, which spread across the Pacific from Taiwan around four thousand years ago, and shares no proven common ancestor with Indo-European. There is no plausible borrowing, no historical contact between the speech communities, no path by which one word could have travelled to the other. And yet both languages independently produced the same phonetic shape (gi-gil, ji-jil) and attached it to two different angles of the same small human moment: cute things, and the people who do or don’t have them.
Tagalog noticed the holder’s loving urge. Armenian noticed the social transaction between the holder and the wanter. Same general territory; entirely different things named. The territory is human, but the maps differ.
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Sometimes languages can’t import a word but they know the word exists somewhere, and they refer to it by the language it came from. Here’s my favorite example.
Spanish has vergüenza ajena. Literally, borrowed shame, or other-people’s shame. It names the embarrassment you feel on someone else’s behalf when they are embarrassing themselves and don’t realize it. Watching a friend tell a long, unfunny joke at a dinner party while the table goes quiet, and they don’t notice. You are not embarrassed; they should be. But you feel it for them. That feeling, transferred across persons, is vergüenza ajena.
Russian doesn’t have a single word for vergüenza ajena. What Russians call it is Spanish shame. Not a translation. A pointer. But Russians didn’t invent that move. The English did. In the 1990s and 2000s, British television imported a wave of Spanish comedies and dramas, and English speakers needed a name for the feeling those awkward shows produced in them. They borrowed the Spanish phrase loosely (”Spanish shame”) and the idiom stuck. From English, it travelled into other languages. Russian got it via the internet sometime in the 2010s, calqued from English back into Russian. The phrase made a small grand tour: Spanish named the feeling, English re-named it after Spanish, Russian translated the English re-naming into Cyrillic. Three languages, one pointer, each one tagging the feeling with the language that had named it before they did.
That move is its own small marvel. Languages don’t always import each other’s vocabulary. Sometimes they import the awareness that another language has named something they haven’t, and they signal that absence by tagging the feeling with the source language’s name. (German did its own thing here, Fremdschämen, “stranger-shaming,” a native German construction. So did Finnish, with myötähäpeä, “with-shame,” and Dutch with plaatsvervangende schaamte. Languages near each other in cultural exchange share solutions. Languages further apart, like Tagalog and Armenian, occasionally produce the same sound by accident. Two different mechanisms, both visible in this essay)
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French has l’esprit de l’escalier, the spirit of the staircase. The perfect retort that occurs to you only after you’ve left the conversation and are descending the stairs on your way out. Coined by Diderot in the 1770s, after he lost an argument at a dinner party and found his comeback only as he was leaving the host’s apartment. The phrase has travelled across European languages — German has Treppenwitz, the staircase joke, with the same metaphor and meaning. This isn’t independent coincidence; this is European neighbours trading a good idea. Different mechanism than gigil and jijil. Both real.
German has Feierabend, the protected post-work evening. Literally, celebration-evening. Not just “after work,” but the ritually-closed sanctuary of time the workday is no longer allowed to enter. Germans say schönen Feierabend! the way English speakers say have a good evening, but with more weight. Calling a colleague during their Feierabend without genuine emergency is a small social transgression. The word and the practice support each other: the evening is protected because the language has a name for what’s being protected.
Ukrainian has вирій (vyriy). The mythical warm land where birds go when they fly south for winter. Older than Christianity in Slavic culture - the otherworldly summer-land where birds wintered and souls of the dead temporarily resided. It survives in modern Ukrainian as folk-poetic word and layered metaphor. Children watching geese fly south are told: they are flying to vyriy. Half-literal (the birds are migrating south), half-mythological (they are going to the warm otherworld), half-poetic (they are returning to where they belong). English has “where birds go for the winter,” which is descriptive and hollow. Vyriy carries cosmology, season, and longing in two syllables.
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Here is one more, from a language I do speak. In my native Armenian, you don’t say good morning. You say բարի լույս. Bari looys. Kind light.
English good morning marks time. It locates you in a part of the day. It says: I acknowledge that it is morning, and I wish you well within it. The morning itself is a neutral container, the way English mostly treats time.
Armenian bari looys names something else. Not the time, but what the time gives you. The light. The illumination that comes with morning, the gift of being able to see again. The greeting wishes you kind light, meaning the hours ahead should be well-lit; both literally, a clear day, and figuratively, clarity, visibility, things going well. Two cultures performing the same daily act. One acknowledges the time, the other names what the time gives you.
Living in seven languages - and none of them German, Tagalog, Dutch, Finnish or Norwegian, sadly - doesn’t mean I see the world seven times more clearly. Most days, it just means I have seven slightly different ways of saying simple things, and an enduring suspicion that whichever one I’m using is missing something the others would have caught. That suspicion is, I think, the only kind of clarity that survives translation. The map is partial. There are other maps. I browse them quite often. Some include features yours doesn’t. That knowledge is the closest thing to seeing more.
So, bari looys. Kind light to you, reader. Not just in the morning. All the way through.