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Comment by gyomu | Hacker News Reader

> * 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up.

i don't speak Thai or Mandarin, so I can't speak to the other 2, but this one is a pun (combining tsundeoku, pile up, and dokusho, book reading) that survived in the language due to its catchiness.

A bit like "hangry" (hungry + angry) in English.

I have a hard time interpreting the existence of those words as an indication that Japanese culture really values not reading the books you buy, or English speaking culture is irritated due to hunger more so than other cultures.

They're just meme-like constructs that caught on due to arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.

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Perhaps wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) might be a better example?

"wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection."

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi)

there are no good examples. The basic premise in Linguistics these days seems tl be that all languages are potentially equally expressive. Trade-offs in one domain (grammar, lexicon, phonology etc.) afford advantages in another. Which means, there is no need to refer to Japanese at all.

You could equally refer to some slur in a lower register to then claim that this doesn't exist in your language and how it can't be translated either. So when Joe Biden said "SoB" on tape once, that was code switching; likewise, when Trump says anything it's all made up and coded and means something entirely different. However, these are bad examples if your target is a monolingual Japanese, obv.

> They're just meme-like constructs that caught on due to arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.

My take: they became instant memes and experience wide adoption because they capture a concept without another name - and that makes it not just easy to talk about, but also to think about in the first place (counter to article's thesis?).

However, Tsundoku hasn't caught on, at least not in English, except as a vain example of language fun facts. If there was a need, it would be borrowed eventually, perhaps as a semantic loan (calque). We call it hording already. Japanese simply adds a work related to reading. I don't read Japanese but I can recognize the "speech" radical at least.

> arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.

Along the lines of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenning#Old_English_and_other_... , english could contain "book-dragon".

Book-dragon is a fantastic word. Thank you for that!

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