Thirteen Untranslatable Words

by Michael Covarrubias

I’ m a language lover. I have been since I was a kid. Just about eleven months after being born, I started saying words and I’ve been using them ever since. I probably use words every day and I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

After a while, we language lovers have a hard time learning more about our native language. That’s why we branch out to memorize other languages. It can be hard though, because a lot of foreign languages have words in them that we just can’t translate into English. Maybe it’s because we don’t have the concept in English, and that makes it impossible to make up a label for the concept. Or, more interestingly, maybe we don’t have the concepts in English because we don’t have the word in the first place! History’s first linguist, a guy named Sapir Whorf, discovered that without a word, we can’t think.

I’ve been doing some research on this topic, and I’ve found some of the most amazing untranslatable words in the non- American speaking world. Here they are, in no spectacular order.