But that's true of any language. Not only that, but English uses loanwords heavily which are often Anglicisations of words from other languages, which may not in themselves be just one word.
"Ho ho ho", the flag-waving Little Englander types say, "Gaelic is such a stupid language, they don't even have a word for 'television', they just say 'television' in a stupid accent!"
But English also has no word for "television". Worse, the word "television" isn't even just a loanword, it's two words from two different languages, "tele" from Greek and "vision" from Latin. What a bodge job! Imagine letting something like that slip through to production use!
The hypothetical Catalan-Hungarian inventor of it in another leg of the trousers of time may have called it llunylátás, and then where would we be?
Well, most languages would have some variant of that word to mean "television", as they do now, I expect.
The English word "galore" (meaning "sufficient" shading towards "more than enough") comes from the Gaelic words "gu leòr", (goo lyaawr, the grave accent above the o makes the vowel sound longer). What a silly language English is, doesn't have a word that means "more than you're ever likely to need", has to steal one from Gaelic and then spell it wrong.
Oh, they use this word "whisky". You know what that means? It means "uisge beatha" but they only say the first word, in a silly accent because they can't pronounce it properly.
Quite often there's no single word for a thing you're trying to translate but that doesn't mean it's untranslateable. English has only one single word for rain, for example, but Gaelic has about half a dozen of which the only ones I can reproduce here are "uisge" (that word again) which just means "water", and "fras" which is more like a gentle shower. The rest of the words in the Gaelic of the North-West of Scotland that refer to rainy weather are, of course, profane in the extreme.
But I think most of those words are in use somewhere, for something.
English people will say something like: Germans have a word for everything.
Many of which are just sentences with the spaces removed.
Australia’s have a lot of those too, or worse: our speech is often nothing but a handful of vowels and a swarm of apostrophes.
VLIW natural language.
(I was addressing the parent's claim of 'But English also has no word for "television"')
The word telly is not in common usage in the United States. It’s understood here to be UK slang for TV.
Your example is largely irrelevant; I wouldn’t call a spyware TV founded by Russian born dude a cultural touchstone.
Regardless of origin the word television is an English word now. The ability to adopt loan words from other languages is one of the many reasons English usage is so widespread.
Happy: Joyful, cheerful, merry, delighted
Or
Beautiful: Lovely, pretty, attractive
The only truly identical synonym I can think of is flammable and inflammable
But what joyful means to you likely differs from what it means to me, simply because we haven’t read the exact same literature and had the same conversations.
I'm just on the thread following this idea: "The article seems to think that a word is untranslateable if there is no single word in the target language"
So we're talking about "translatability" of single words. Mapping multiple words of language X to one word of language Y is going to have some effect on translation.
These examples have just the meanings of a noun + adjective or of a noun + noun in genitive case, where some languages are lazier than others and omit the markers of case or of adjectival derivation from noun, which are needed in more strict languages.
There are also other kinds of compound nouns, where the compound noun does not have the meaning of its component words, but only some related meaning (usually either a pars pro toto meaning or a metaphorical meaning). Those are true compound nouns, not just abbreviated sequences of words from which the grammatical markers have been omitted.
Such compound words were very frequent in Ancient Greek, from where they have been inherited in the scientific and technical language, where they have been used to create names for new things and concepts, e.g. arthropod, television, phonograph, basketball, "bullet train" and so on.
This kind of compound words are almost never translatable, but they are frequently borrowed from one language to another and during the borrowing process sometimes the component words are translated, but the result is not a translated word, it is a new word that is added to the destination language.
The example that people often quote from German is “kummerspeck” which would literally translate as “grief bacon”, but means weight you put on through comfort eating having gone through a bereavement or other trauma.
Wouldn't cranberry morphemes be good examples this type of relationship? I don't know if, in the eponymous example, the cran- being bound precludes it from being counted as a closed compound word or not though.
An English speaker might be willing to accept componoma ("names placed together", Latin) or synthetonoma (also "names placed together", Greek) without breaking stride.
This is false; English loves using compound words. One example of such a compound word is "fire department", which has identical syntax to the German compound "Feuerwehr". Whether a compound word is spelled with or without internal spaces is not a fact about the language, it's a fact about the spelling.
In another blog post where he uses "shibui" as an example of an untranslatable word, he says, "Saying shibui like that, in a mere second, conveys what would otherwise make a clunky and unnecessarily long digression."
At the root of nearly all the blog posts like this one (basically explaining why they don't agree with a widely held belief) is a redefinition of a term or word into something very specific that contradicts the common definition.
Even if the number of words in a language were finite we wouldn't have a reasonable way of counting them. There are too many kinds of fuzziness involved in deciding what counts as a "word" and you can't ignore the borderline cases because the borderline cases vastly outnumber the straightforward cases.
You're forgetting about synonyms. The common adage that English has the largest vocabulary stems from the fact that it often has multiple words for the same thing. Sofa, couch. Autumn, fall. Etc etc. Other languages generally don't do this. I've never heard anyone suggest that English has words for more concepts.
So I'd prefer to stick to concepts that actually do mean something, where "synonym" is two words that have the same primary functional meaning. Splitting hairs over whether autumn is "cozier" than fall does not change the fact that they are synonyms by any reasonable definition, or change the point that English has a hugely larger number of synonyms than any other language, for certain historical reasons.
This becomes immediately apparent (and relevant) when writing fiction or poetry. At least it does to me.
Non-fiction and spoken English do not highlight the subtleties between these words because using them interchangeably in the same work is considered bad form.
I think people don't realize how weird language is. Like you could look at Chinese and call each sentence a "word" as there are no spaces. What's the difference between that and a compound word like "nighttime" or the whole German language where you got words like Krankenwagen ("patient" + "car").
Now this doesn't mean there aren't words or phrases that aren't translatable. But the thing is we can always translate the words themselves. What we can't always translate is the meaning behind them. I think the best example of this comes from Star Trek and the Tamarian Language[0,1]. "Sokath, his eyes open!" The problem with communication is not that the words don't translate, it is that the meaning behind them doesn't. Just as people struggle with idioms when learning American English or why someone might be confused about why someone "shit in the milk" or "fucked the dog". Words are an embedding. A compression.
The thing people are constantly forgetting, but is more important than ever in a globally connected world, is that words are not perfect representations of thoughts. We compress our thoughts into them and hope the person on the other side can decompress them. It is why you can more easily communicate with your close friends who have better context than you can with another person that natively speaks your language and is why someone that learns a new language can speak perfectly well but still struggle to communicate. Language is not just words, it is culture[2]. So in a much more connected world today we have these disconnects in culture and thus interpretation of what people say. I know every one of you has been told to "speak to your audience" but how do you speak to your audience when your audience is everybody and when you don't know who your audience is? The new paradigm requires us to be much better interpreters than we were before. Least everyone is going to sound crazy, other than those you frequently talk to and have that shared understanding.
[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tamarian_language
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-wzr74d7TI
[2] This is, btw, why people argue for embodied AI being so critical. Not because LLMs can't appear to grasp the language, but because we as humans have embodied our language so deeply you probably didn't even realize that I used the word "grasp" to refer to an abstract concept and not something you can actually touch with your hand.