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I agree that saying it's an elusive uniquely French concept is wrong. It is a fairly common concept. But at the same time I don't think English has a good word for it.

Culturally that's not that surprising. The idea that a sausage from one region of the country is materially different than a similarly produced sausage from the a different part of the country is common in France, Germany or Italy, but doesn't seem common in England or the USA. And since it's not a thing in their culture it's not a thing in their language.

Which in English/American modus operandi means importing the word from the first place they heard it (usually France) and claiming it originated there.

No "terroir" has not the same meaning as earth or land. It's wider and related to both the local environment and local practices.

Wikipedia says:

Terroir is a French term used to describe the environmental factors that affect a crop's phenotype, including unique environment contexts, farming practices and a crop's specific growth habitat. Collectively, these contextual characteristics are said to have a character; terroir also refers to this character.

Yes, he clearly knows that, he gave multiple specific examples of local environment and local practices. I agree, terroir is not an elusive and untranslatable concept, it's a well understood and widely translated concept.

The concepts are not hard to understand and it is not uniquely French, far from it. That said, I cannot think of a single-word equivalent in English.

I can't think of a single-word translation for schadenfreude either, but that doesn't mean anything

TIL Epicaricacy, from ancient Greek ( it was unlikely that the Ancient Greeks didn't have a word for something such a human flaw.

"epicaricacy" fails the simplest test for word-ness: it's never [0] used with the expectation of being understood without explanation. (Nor ever has been, according to Wiktionary.) It seems to have been one of the earliest Nihilartikels.

It could still be adopted as a learnèd (read: pretentious) borrowing from Greek, of course, but in that case it would be spelled epicharicacy.

[0] Edit: Well, hardly ever. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citations:epicaricacy#English

Except he provided an inaccurate translation so it seems to me that the concept is not so well understood...

IMHO it is indeed untranslatable in the sense that there is no single word in English with the same meaning so that a translation requires a description (illustrated by my quote from Wikipedia that spends a whole paragraph explaining what it means).

As a French, and native French speaker, I would think that I should know... The reaction of the HN crowd is hilarious sometimes.

In Japanese we have the word 風土 (Fuudo) which is a compound of 風 “fuu” which means in this context “manner/style” (it can also mean “wind”) and 土 “do” which means “earth/soil”. Like “terroir” it describes the interplay between the physical land, local customs, and spiritual aspects.

> Again, English words for dirt, e.g. land, can be used for the exact same meaning.

Yeah, no, you don't get it. The stuff you can hold in your hand is maybe a quarter of it.

"Land" doesn't mean just the stuff you can hold in your hand. It literally has several pages dedicated to it in the OED. The big one. "Ground" too.

It so happens that the word for "dirt" in many languages acquire meaning that transcends mere silica and humus, as our Japanese friend pointed out.

And why would this surprise anyone? "Terroir" is using the word for "ground", "land" as a poetic metaphor for everything needed to make a peasant happy (as opposed to content).

> Again, English words for dirt, e.g. land, can be used for the exact same meaning. The word terroir is not elusive; rather this is just another case of upper class English speakers fetishizing French culture mixed with French cultural conceit all too eager to oblige.

I am not a native English speaker as I am French. From my knowledge of english, I don't feel like "land" would encompass the same meaning as "terroir". And I'm far from saying that the concept is french; rather than the word itself is complex. By glancing at other replies in this thread, it is closer to the Japanese word somebody else mentioned. "land" is too down to earth (pun intended) for the meaning. One case though I would consider them similar is for describing people, e.g. someone saying "I'm a pure produce of the highlands (land)!" which is similar to someone saying "Je suis un pur produit du terroir bourguignon !" (I'm a pur produce of the burgundy terroir).

As another commenter put it, the earth is maybe 25% tops of terroir.

> Italians have the exact same concept of "terra" when they explain why a little village in Umbria makes the best prosciutto (it hits the best humidity level allowing for optimal drying rate). Or why not all the land in Montalcino bear the same quality wine (mostly due to the quality of the amount of sun/shade)

Notice the difference between your examples and mines: yours are "the best of this" and "the best of that". Notice how mine are all simple foods, popular foods (popular as in populace, not as in showbiz star), unexceptional foods. Terrine is made with the offcuts of hunting game. Same for sausage. In fact, we would not say that Moët or Veuve Clicquot champagnes are terroir produces; but Beaujolais Nouveau definitely is, . Terroir is about the mix of local products and deeply cultural items, not michelin-star proscuitto. It is not about that special variety of tomatoes that only grows on a 1km² field on the north-east side of mount Vesuvio. It's about what would be done with said tomatoes.

> In fact, your entire message is basically the definition of the EU's DOC.

If you're talking about regional protections (AOP/AOC in France: Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée/Protégée), those are like, the exact opposite of terroir. Well, of terroir the true one, not the fantasized posh one from the aforementioned English people. Such protections are made to avoid consumer confusion to ensure only sparkling white wine from the Champagne region can be called Champagne, or that only dry and hard and salty cheese from the Parma region can be called Parmigiano Reggiano. There is no notion of protection in what we call terroir (but pride yes, we're french after all!).

> The idea that terroir is an elusive French concept is also incredibly Eurocentric. Im European (origin) so I only have European examples; but do you really think that advanced civilizations like the Chinese or Japanese don't have the exact same concept as "terroir"?

I was only commenting about the word itself, trying to explain the notion we encompass with it. As for other civilizations, they most definitely have. In fact, I'm pretty sure the two you mentioned go even further that us given their very strong attachment to traditions, craftmanship, and locations.

Anyways, this word is so large that we have several of the longest comments I've ever seen here on hacker news :)

I was extremely pleasantly surprised by the fact that Ethiopians seem to sharre a proper understanding of terroir for qat and honey and, boy, are there major differences from one region to the next. (Astonishingly I didn't perceive anything similar for coffee, which was dark roasted almost everywhere I went, despite astounding bioclimatic and genetic conditions throughout the coffee belts.) The Chinese certainly have something like it, but probably more refined and articulated around much higher social classes. Certain teas were paired with mineral waters from a specific source for instance — that far exceeds the more rustic French notion of terroir.

That being said, terroir is something more that just "land" and includes the idea of common rules or ways of doing things, and of course genetics.

When a type of cheese can only use the highly creamy milk from a specific breed of cow, the result is highly specific and tasty, yet it doesn't express anything that's really related to the land itself at that stage. Camembert is widely understood as a typical terroir-expressing product, yet it would be pretty much the same if it were produced elsewhere than in Normandy with the same production methods, breeds, yeasts, and same access to pasture for cows for instance. It's the common approach that lends terroir to it. (Well, theoretically, because the an unpasteurized Camembert fermier will actually be more similar to a creamy, soft-ripened farmer's Brie than a pasteurized industrial Camembert, the slight difference is butterfat content notwithstanding).

The fetishizing actually transformed the way local products are perceived and grown, by lending importance to the idea that instead of going for something generic, we should be aiming to express something more, the way some grape varietal can express the underlying mineral bedbrock (as with Chardonnay in Burgundy's Chablis area, which is geologically a region of Kimmeridgian limestone). It's posh to some extent. I remember meeting a old wine producer from the Loire region at a wine tasting a few years back who was befuddled by some of the audience's questions and that basically asked us to keep the complex questions for his son because he had only been trained to make wine that was nice to drink in the same way his forefathers did and just had no idea in what way his soil and grapes were special because those were the only ones he knew.

A lot of it is fake/commercial gatekeeping and poring over details of DOC regulations can be quite disturbing at times. For instance, DOC foie gras produced from Barbary ducks, which cannot naturally deliver fat liver like geese and that were never used before being hyperselected by the French agricultural research institute INRA in the postwar era. Meat products or cheese that use generic methods that could be applied anywhere seem to be the worst offenders. DOC cheese with clonal lines of moulds, give me a break… DOC wine in Italy seems to be similarly impacted if I'm to believe Jonathan Nossiter of 'Mondovino''s fame. Interestingly, one of the Italian winemakers in his follow-up documentary 'Natural Resistance' actually says something along the lines of "there's no concept of terroir in Italian"" and basically everyone in that documentary use the French word. I really do think it's an interesting, elusive concept, but one that intuitively clicks with people throughout the globe that don't necessarily have as mature a word for the same ideas and that most French people don't necessarily understand either because of how commercialized it is and how prevalent the paradigm of uniformization has become. Everyone wants terroir, but Camembert uses albino moulds because everyone wants them perfectly white, cider comes with labels mentioning how the liquid might be cloudy but it remains perfectly safe to drink, etc.

> do you really think that advanced civilizations like the Chinese or Japanese don't have the exact same concept as "terroir"?

No, they do not. But they do have other concepts which in turn cannot be translated into European languages. The great thing about human consciousness, culture, and language is that not everybody is working off the same epistemological map. There really are concepts which don't translate 1:1 from one language to another. That doesn't mean they can't be understood across cultures -- just that they may take many paragraphs of text to convey the meaning accurately, whereas in their original cultural context that meaning is embedded in the shared experience of how that word is used.

Think about Greek words for "Love" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love). With a short paragraph of text you can at least the gist of their meaning (but there are definitely shades of meaning which will nevertheless be missed, barring greater immersion in its use). Suffice it to say, simply mapping those words onto "Love" will lose a huge amount of meaning.

Agreed that it's annoying to present words that aren't directly translatable as incomprehensible mysteries, which could never be understood by the non-French mind. Of course it can be understood, it just takes a bit of work to understand this. But equally, I don't think it's appropriate to go the other direction and think that there's a straightforward 1:1 mapping, when there definitely isn't.