Japanese Words That Don't Exist in English | Hacker News Reader

Japanese Words That Don't Exist in English

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52 pointsphodo65 comments

I find it interesting that the article calls these words "untranslatable" but then proceeds to translate them. Yes, there are no single words in English that have the exact meanings of the single words in Japanese, but "untranslatable" gives the impression of not being able to convey the meaning in English even with multiple words--but that's exactly what the article does.

They might have failed miserably at translating these words

Except that the very first paragraph makes it clear that the author means "doesn't have a single-word translation".

Of course, not all of these are single words in Japanese, either—"mononoaware" is usually given as 3: "mono no aware".

I think 8note means that, unless one speaks Japanese, the multi-word translations given in the article might be incorrect and we wouldn't know any better.

I understand that. But we shouldn't think that's more likely to be true here than any other article translating Japanese because the phrases easily satisfy the author's definition of "untranslatable", and there's not really a reason to think that these terms are actually beyond the ability to translate given the ability to use many words.

If only there were a single word that could convey "difficult to translate without using more than one word", alas the closest we have is "untranslatable".

I think it's a useful warning signal that any attempted translation is provisional, has limited scope and can't be relied on. A less absolute word or phrase might give the impression that a straightforward translation is possible, but 'untranslatable' is a stark warning.

Furthermore, what is a single word anyway? Many alphabet based languages make this easy with spaces, but the multiple characters of Chinese and kana make it easy to stack things without ever using a space to break it into distinct parts. So of course Japanese is capable of generating really long and therefore unique "words".

Same with German. But even there, there are connotations surrounding those compound words that are lost in translation to English.

The thing with "untranslatable" words is that their perfectly translatable, but the connotations surrounding them are completely different. What untranslatable then means in this context is that the listener of the translated version will /not/ understand the same meaning as someone listening to the non-translated version.

For instance, while the literal translation of shouganai is "it can't be helped," I'll translate it as "shit happens" in one situation, or "that's bureaucracy for you" (among other things) in another, depending on context. There simply isn't a reliable equivalent.

Also, imagine a scene (one that occurs every day at the end of my restaurant shift) where everyone is saying "otsukare" to each other. How should I translate that? Should I just have people yelling "TIRED" to the room? I'd have translated the word 'correctly' but not actually reflected the general feeling of "wow, we did it bro. Good job"

I'm currently learning Japanese. As I've learned these 'untranslatable words' of course I learned them through dictionaries and English explanations. As I saw them used and used them myself, though, they came to mean something different. I had to develop a new concept to compile them to, as it were. Now I find them difficult to translate back to English, and instead they have become new words in my vocabulary. It's why pigeon languages happen. (you should see the English spoken in the English-speaking office I worked at. It's stolen many Japanese words)

'It's stolen many Japanese words'. That's the beauty of English and partly the cause of its universal success: it appropriates or invents as necessary. Moreover it doesn't have a committee deciding which words are acceptable.

Well, it does, but nobody listens!

I like these:

Murahachibu: shunning, public ostracism. Originally meant being excluded from eight (out of ten) aspects of village life. The two jobs which a person under murahachibu were still allowed to perform were firefighting and undertaking, considered the meanest, dirtiest, and least desirable jobs. Handling corpses was thought to make a person "unclean", and persons who did so were isolated to the slummiest village districts called buraku; from these are descended the burakumin, who (much like blacks in the USA) have been historically an oppressed underclass and yet have contributed much to the modern street culture of Japan.

Modern murahachibu is practiced in a less severe form: if you fail to kiss the right asses and scratch the right backs in your professional or social life, you will find yourself without help when you most need help.

Daikon ashi: thick legs (on a woman). A daikon is, of course, a long thick radish used in Japanese cooking. It turns out that Japanese women are at least as self-conscious about not having a "thigh gap" as are Western women.

Tachiyomi: to "read standing up". When you're in a bookshop and you pick a book off the shelf and start reading it right in the shop. Manga fans love to do this; bookshop owners will sometimes throw people out for doing it. Brings back memories of being an early teen and heading straight for the magazine racks to read ALL THE GAMING MAGAZINES while my mother did the shopping.

I really like:

"Kintsukuroi": the art of repairing pottery with gold or silver joining the pieces and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.

Westerners have the Nietzsche'esque notion of 'what does not kill you makes you stronger'. But "Kintsukuroi" is more like 'what does not destroy you makes you more beautiful.' It's as if the effort and care taken to repair the item confers a sense of heightened value on it.

It is beautiful, to say the least.

There's one word that I expected to be in the list but it isn't, which is もったいない (mottai nai)

It describes the situation where something/someone that is still of some use is left unused and wasted, such as leaving food on the table or wasting somebody's talent.

I'm a Japanese who's been living in the US for more than a decade, and I always thought this one word represents what's missing in American culture the most.

That sounds like it's most equivalent to "squadered": http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/squander

English probably borrows from other languages more than any other.

What's stopping us from just stealing these words? In Singapore for example, people will often just drop in a Malay or Cantonese word.

Nothing. A few of those are already on their way to being borrowed. I've read "kintsugi" (slightly different spelling than the article) in a very much in English legal brief and heard at least one other (wabi-sabi) in another context, again used as if it were part of English. If they're useful, they may just get assimilated.

Borrowing words is pretty common. I went on an exchange to a small town in Québec when I was in high school. They borrowed English words to use in French. The only thing is that their use wasn't quite the same as English. For example, I was asked if a girl who was a good friend of mine was my "chum". I said yes, not knowing that they use it to mean girlfriend/boyfriend.

Good examples for English borrowing words are "nirvana" and "dharma". Both are hard to translate their meaning into English so we just go with the word itself.

There probably hasn't been a pressing specific need in English for those specific words; English has definitely borrowed a number of Japanese words, some of which are very common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Japan...

For example, something like 木枯らし (kogarashi, the first wind of winter) is extremely specific and must have been important at some point in Japanese culture, but there isn't any real need for it in English any more than there is for "zephyr" (a gentle wind from the West).

Some of these do have English equivalents, like しょうがない, which is really two words and a particle. Most people I know who speak English would just say "oh well" in a resigned tone or, more casually, "shit happens."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective

This makes me wonder what English words are unique to English, kind of like "breakfast" (in the context of a Burmese tribe) mentioned at the top of the article. There's gotta be a few, right?

Twerking.

If you accept "modern" words like twerking,I would bet that English is the language with the biggest number of untranslatable words, for the simple reason that nowadays most culture is first produced in English.

There is plenty of (pop-)culture produced in other languages. It's just people not speaking those languages not noticing most.

There's a couple of orders of magnitude more culture being produced English than any other language (I speak three other languages)

I wouldn't be so sure that there is less produced in Mandarin than in English. Spanish and Arabic might be behind but definitely not an order of magnitude. Also don't forget things like the massive film industry producing in Hindi.

Also, you original claim was that English produces more "culture" than all other languages combined which is definitely wrong. Not even one out of seven speaks English. Are you really claiming that English-speakers have on average more than six times the cultural output than non-English-speakers?

(I also don't know what your definition "produced culture" is as life is not a game of Civilization, but that's besides the point.)

I'd guess at least half of all technical philosophical terms in English are "untranslatable" in this sense.

It'd be more appropriate to say that it's Burmanese that's uncommon for not having such a banal word.

English words that don't exist in Japanese:

* identity (the notion simply does not exist here)

* fairness (we don't care this either)

* racist (but it doesn't mean we don't have it, we're simply unaware of it)

And yes, there's an awkward translation for these words, but they all sound very foreign.

edit: added newlines

Another edit: I read that words like "liberty", "equality" or even "love" didn't exist in Japanese until 19c, when people were importing Western documents to Japan. That's probably why we're still so behind of these things.

I had a Japanese ID card, when I lived in Japan. So the notion must exist.

"identity" has connotations; it doesn't just mean mathematical sameness (such that if x and y are connected by identity, they are in fact the same thing and not distinct).

Like "what is my identity?" Or "It's important for individuals to feel that they have an identity".

etymonline.com dates the appearance of "racist" as a noun to 1932 and as an adjective to 1938.

There's a difference between the word has a historical record and it was commonly used. These words did exist. I was saying they are simply not in widespread use like the ones in English.

Love existed in the language way before the XIX century: 'ai' (愛), 'koi' (恋) but interestingly enough, these are also loanwords (from Chinese).

Being in a dictionary didn't mean people used it. In my view, a word doesn't really exist until it reaches a certain widespread use.

Do you have a link to some free on-line dictionary of Japanese etymology where we can find the origins of words and how old they are?

Tangentially related, but there's a short story written by Poul Anderson under the constraint of "pure English" -- that is, only English words of Germanic origin.

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/st...

I think that "Bullying" is unique to English, at least there is not equivalent to it in Portuguese and we usually just borrow it from English

It's "mobbning" in Swedish https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbning

japanese and german share a lexical pattern

the more syllables in a word then the fewer definitions it has

it is interesting to me that the author chose these 'types' of words to highlight

their highly specialised nature makes them far more translatable than the Japanese words i find most beautiful

my favourite japanese word is 間,ma (o)

it is difficult to translate because it simultaneously carries multiple meanings: "gap", "space", "pause" or "the space between two structural parts"(i); it can refer to any existence of negatives space, be it temporal, physical or metaphysical

the kanji is a combination of the characters for: gate(ii) and sun(iii); two of the most important symbols in japanese iconography, and the question of whether the sun is setting or rising between the gate is up to interpretation as well

(o) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%96%93

(i) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_(negative_space)

(ii) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%96%80

(iii) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5

Polysemy is fairly common in languages. In my French-English dictionary, working out how to translate the simple word "get" takes up over two pages--and most of that is not dealing with the English proclivity for coining idiomatic verb phrases (e.g., "to put up" is completely different from any connotation of "to put" with the preposition "up"). The verbs "go", "set", and "put" also have impressively long definition lists if you consider these derivative verb phrases.

Sure, nearly every dictionary entry lists multiple definitions

Partially why I used the word 'multiple meanings' stead 'multiple defintions'

ma's charm is in its single definition: negative space; having its own many meanings: temporal, physical,metaphysical

Similarly latin's animus(o):mind, soul,conciousness,heart; multiple meanings all trying to define a single concept

Look at a first kiss

In the moments before a kiss ma is present temporally as the negative space between the decision to act and the action, physically as the material distance between sets of lips, and metaphysically as the distance between the animus of the individuals about to experience a post first kiss existence

(o) https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/animus

> with the English proclivity for coining idiomatic verb phrases

English does love idioms, and though they can be frustrating, the time to learn them in any language always pays off..an idiom

Idioms are a huge factor in changing a language and keeping it new, and often are born of rebellion and subversion

Idioms and puns used to feel insular to me so I began collecting international versions of them

Nomihodai is a Japanese idiom that means 'all you can eat', but speak it aloud to a Spanish speaker and now you are using the Spanish idiom 'no me jodas' meaning 'don't fuck with me'

English's biggest annoyance, or strength?, is it's abundance of propositions.. look up the French word 'de'(o) in you fr-en dictionary

(o) https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/de#French

I did look it up. de wasn't nearly so bad, managing only a few inches of space. «faire» was the worst of the French words I could think up, squeezing out around a page.

The problem with English prepositions is that much of their usage isn't really analyzable as prepositions. "to put", "to put up", and "to put up with" are all effectively three different verbs, and those prepositions are usually better analyzed as particles. However, grade school English grammar tends to be derived from attempts to analyze English according to traditional Greek grammar, which turns out to work poorly in practice (and hence, everything you learned in English class is probably wrong).

Nothing is quite as beautiful and poetic as the German, 'Backpfeifengesicht', meaning sort of "A face that wants to be slapped".

Or the marginally less snarky 'Gemütlichkeit':

A space or state of warmth, friendliness, and good cheer. Other qualities include coziness, peace of mind, belonging, well being, and social acceptance. The term is most commonly associated with the tenor of a German beer garden.

Now. Use it in a sentence.

Kannst du meine Gemütlichkeit nicht stören, bitte.

(or something... ;) )

Probier's mal mit Gemütlichkeit!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_EWWyJfgPc

No idea what the song is in English, though :)

Edit: got it, "Bare Necessities": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ogQ0uge06o

Ha, fantastic, thanks!

I love that word! That, and the contrast between 'Gemeinschaft' and 'Gesellschaft'.

Convivial.

Good one.

A 'famous' Dutch-specific word is 'gezellig' or 'gezelligheid'. Its more specific than 'gemütlichkeit', and not entirely the same. In fact, we have another word, 'gemoedelijkheid' which is more similar in meaning, but we probably use it differently than germans because we also have 'gezelligheid'.

Another difficult-to-translate word I really like is 'saudade' (Portuguese): "a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament." (according to google).

Language is fascinating, and I especially like words for feelings/emotions that have no direct translations.

Well, at least half of Japanese words are borrowed either from English or from Chinese, so it works in reverse as well.

Here's one that nobody mentioned yet:

Tsundoku - when you buy new books but end up never reading them

Certainly the first time I've seen "otsukaresama" described as "beautiful". It's like something you say to your coworkers when you pass them in the hallway.

Komorebi is called God's Ray in video game sphere.

The Japanese word "mu" can be translated as "I reject the premise of your question" - a word which would be very useful in English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)

It's not really a word; it's a prefix or an abbreviation. Nobody would ever say "mu" alone, let alone to mean "I reject the premise of your question" in conversation, even if it were culturally acceptable.

Well it's used as a word in the mu koan. Might be archaic and not used in modern Chinese or Japanese, I don't know, but for 'mu' as the prefix we have (as far as I understand, which is admittedly not particularly deep) 'not'. 'Mu' as in 'your question is based on faulty premises' is the more useful form for Westerners, I'd argue.

The koan in question is Chinese, not Japanese; Japanese allows for the reading of old Chinese with Japanese readings, but Japanese people won't understand it without specific knowledge of how to read Japanized Chinese, so it's in a really weird place in general -- it's definitely not something I'd call a "Japanese word," though.

Why is it impossible to select words from that article? (FF current)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXI1GHtqDEU

Hmm...my adblock doesn't work on that site. There's an ad between each word. It actually made me more enraged. It's a listy, click bait, rubbish, bullshit article.

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