{"id":5406,"date":"2017-03-13T07:04:52","date_gmt":"2017-03-13T11:04:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/?p=5406"},"modified":"2020-10-01T13:03:59","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T17:03:59","slug":"can-borrowing-words-from-other-languages-unlock-new-thoughts-and-feelings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/2017\/03\/13\/can-borrowing-words-from-other-languages-unlock-new-thoughts-and-feelings\/","title":{"rendered":"Can borrowing words from other languages unlock new thoughts and feelings?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest Post by Sean\u00a0Fitzsimons<\/a> – linguistics graduate, writer and researcher.<\/p>\n

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Every language has its limits. Languages cannot simply stretch their semantic fields to describe what others can in remarkable detail. By learning new languages, we can not only enrich our communication skills and cultural understanding, but also tap into thoughts which we previously had no concise way of expressing.<\/p>\n

While languages are constantly evolving, they are also reflecting the community and systems they are spoken in<\/a>. Perhaps one of the most well-known examples<\/a> of a language expanding in terminology to suit the practical needs of its speakers, is within the various Inuit dialects and their many ways of referencing and categorizing snow.<\/p>\n

Not every language necessarily can put such a large lexicon of snow references to good use. However, there are plenty of concepts which are universally common and take on deeper, more specific meanings, depending on what language you are using.<\/p>\n

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With a little more exploration, it becomes clear how many holes actually exist in the vocabulary of our own mother tongues. Just like any language, English lacks words to describe particular thoughts and feelings – lexical gaps that are easy to miss. We\u2019ve all felt emotions that we can\u2019t quite put into a single word, yet there is a good chance another language out there probably can.<\/p>\n

Expressing love, for example, may seem straightforward in one sense. The ways in which languages verbally interpret love<\/a>, though, can vary hugely.<\/strong> Take a familiar boy-meets-girl scenario often depicted in teen films:<\/p>\n

Two people\u2019s eyes meet, they yearn to initiate something but are both afraid of doing so. Rather than keeping this awkward scenario pent up inside them, a speaker of Y\u00e1gan in Tierra del Fuego could call this \u2018mamihlapinatapai\u2019<\/em>. By the time one of them does (hopefully) make the first move, assuming the pair hit it off, they will begin to experience the sensation of first falling in love which Norwegians handily call \u2018forelsket\u2019<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As the romance grows, so too does their time spent together, it may even get to the stage where being apart from each other evokes a strong emotional pain that Hindi speakers refer to as \u2018viraag\u2019<\/em>. \u00a0Once the \u2018viraag\u2019 has become all too much to handle, and the lovestruck guy drives over to the girl\u2019s house, an Inuit speaker would call the sense of anticipation in eagerly awaiting someone to arrive at their home \u2018iktsuarpok\u2019<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Fast forward fifty years after a lifetime together, where neither of the couple can imagine life without the other, a romantic sentiment in itself, but they could go one further by adopting the Arabic term ya\u2019burnee<\/em>. This translates literally as \u2018you bury me\u2019 and expresses the hope of dying before their partner, to avoid the pain of enduring a life without them.<\/p>\n

These are what we might call \u201cuntranslatable\u201d words and they extend far beyond the realms of love and romance, but stand for feelings and moments to which most of us can easily relate. The act of gazing vacantly into the distance without any thoughts taking hold has a name in Japanese called \u2018boketto\u2019<\/em>. In Chinese, the sense of perfection or accomplishment after a job well done is known as \u2018yuan bei<\/em>\u2019. Being able to cognitively empathise with someone\u2019s thoughts without even saying a word is called \u2018mitdenken\u2019<\/em> by German speakers.<\/p>\n

All of the words mentioned so far have a broadly feel-good sense about them, and research suggests<\/a> harnessing the power of positive foreign terms in our own everyday language could even improve our personal wellbeing.<\/strong> However, it isn\u2019t only the positive lexicography that is sometimes missing in our vocabularies. A deep, grief-stricken homesickness for a departed entity is coined in Welsh as \u2018hiraeth\u2019<\/em>. Russian speakers use the term \u2018tocka\u2019<\/em> to describe an aching of the soul over a completely unknown cause. Melancholic longing for something (or someone) that might never return to us is simply called \u2018saudade\u2019<\/em> in Portuguese.<\/p>\n

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We might not adopt so many of these words for regular usage any time soon, but there is something quite satisfying about finding a single term to capture a concept or feeling we\u2019ve never been able to properly define before. Although expanding your vocabulary in this way is unlikely to take you on a journey of emotional discovery, it does help us appreciate just how nuanced languages can be in their evolution and understanding of human feelings.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"

Guest Post by Sean\u00a0Fitzsimons – linguistics graduate, writer and researcher. Every language has its limits. Languages cannot simply stretch their semantic fields to describe what others can in remarkable detail. By learning new languages, we can not only enrich our communication skills and cultural understanding, but also tap into thoughts which we previously had no…<\/p>\n

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