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Comment by aji | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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

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.

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.)

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