lexical gaps: missing words

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is there any easy word or expression from other language that you have trouble expressing in your language, or vice-versa? post it here if you think of any!

i was thinking earlier today, this is one that always makes me scratch my head when i try to translate it: wishful thinking. it's such an easy and useful expression in english when you want to describe your frustration with someone (or maybe with yourself...) or when you're talking about complex things like philosophy or politics. everybody is familiar with the expression, and it means exactly what it sounds like it means. no more, no less

but in portuguese there's simply no equivalent word or expression that i can think of, so it's a case-by-case thing. the closest translation i can think of would be mentalidade fantasiosa. but it's not an idiomatic expression, and it's not as specific as wishful thinking. it has a connotation of failing to tell fantasy apart from reality, but not a connotation of "believing it's true because you want it to be true". it can mean wishful thinking, but it can also mean other things like paranoia

I always liked the word "Schadenfreude" but to my knowledge there is no equivalent in either English or Portuguese.

There was a best selling book I used to see displayed at Barnes and Noble, and Borders, titled "the Have a Word for It" (or something like that - dont remember the author's name). Never bought the book (prolly should have), but would flip through it often). It was a collection of words in languages foreign to English for things English doesnt have words for.

A favorite that I recall is "obi":a Japanese word meaning "an imperfection that makes something perfect".
Used to mean a flaw deliberating put into a hand made craft product (like ceramic tea cups), it can be applied to other things.

Another interesting word is a word in the Javanese dialect of Indonesian languages (I forget the actual word) which translates as "fittedness". The author described it as meaning "when you watch your favorite NBA star make a basket at the right moment because the forces of the universe and the stars lined up just right to make it happen - then it has 'fittedness'".

On the other hand there are many surprising gaps in other languages that English doesnt have that we take for granted- including the word "hand" itself1

In Russian there is no word for "hand". the closet equivalent is "rorca" which means "the fore arm including the hand" (the whole body part from your elbow to your fingertips).

Another word is the word for what you see on the turf after you move lawn furniture around.

What you see are "depressions" left by the furniture on the soil.

The word "depression" is an amazingly versatile word that can be applied metaphorically to many things.

Its applies to weather: low pressure zones are called depressions. In a sense weather "depressions" are actual dips in the top of the atmosphere.

Can be used in geography for dips in the landscape, and also used in geology for downward arcs in sedementary layers of rock.

Its used in economics to mean dips in business activity and employment (ie "the Great Depression" ).

And it can be used for downward arcs in emotion.

And thats where the problem is.American mental health professionals have problems communicating with their counterparts in Japan because Japanese has no word for the concept of "a depression" (in the ground, or in anything else) to use as a metaphoric equivalent to our word "depression". So it causes problems in talking about clinical depression in that country. Or thats what I read in a magazine once.

yeah it's a nice word. not so hard to explain in portuguese, with or without context, but still nothing close to a neat word like that

but then, in english, i guess that's one of the main advantages of the frankensteinian nature of the language. it's often odd, cumbersome or confusing, but then, if you ever come across a useful foreign word you want to use, you just use it, and, voilà, "it's english" . and then, of course, any noun can be verbed if you need it to


that's a pretty cool one. not all words (or lack thereof) necessarily reveal a cultural feature of the people who shape the language, but i guess that one actually does


the other what?

it does sound very strange that a major language wouldn't have a word for hand. it's even part of the standard swadesh list

it's not as major "no word for hand", but there's no word for toe in portuguese (did you know you have 20 fingers? )


sure they have a word for it! it's デプレッション ("depuresshon"... lol)

that's one i did take for granted. and i guess it's pretty easy for us to take words for granted when there's a widespread latin word for it. for any european language at least, if there was a lexical gap, it's probably been filled by the latin word for a long time

I'm definitely not an expert, but I do believe there are a few words in Japanese for a depression or dent, and at least one which also carries the connotation of gloom, or 'feeling down'.
For example: 凹み＝kubomi : a dent, a cavity, a depression, へこむ＝hekomu : to sink, to cave in, to be dented, to feel down, to feel overwhelmed, 落ち込む＝ochikomu : to fall into, to feel sad
Also, there is a word I know which is similar to depression in the mood sense 憂鬱= yuuutsu : gloom, melancholy, depression. 憂鬱症 yuuutsushou＝depressive disorder

I wouldn't be surprised if the difficulty were more a cultural issue than a lexical gap.

I'm definitely not claiming to be fluent in Japanese, but I've studied for about two years and I just wanted to chime in. Hope it didn't sound like I was being a know-it-all. If it did, I'm sorry.

Not really expert on it either. One magazine article I read years ago talked about the concept being hard to translate to Japanese. But I gotta admit that it is hard to believe that the Japanese dont a have a word for it.

if we're to believe google translate, then it looks like they're using the english word by now. though i guess it doesn't exclude the possibility that they already had a word for it before, considering how they seem to be fond of importing english words with or without the need for it

Oh, haha. Google Translate certainly has its uses, but it can also be funny sometimes. The other day I wrote a message which I sent to a seller on Ebay, then ran it through Google Translate just for fun and each time I translated back and forth between English and Japanese, it just drifted farther and farther off from I'd originally written in Japanese.

Also it seems to me Google Translate is much like some of the lax translations I've encountered in games, where there's a tendency to leave English words (or deliberately translate to an English word) even if, in reality, they're not the most commonly used word.

Actually the word I gave as an example isn't the most common example for 'depression', but after doing another search it seems the common term for clinical depression is 鬱病／うつ病 utsubyou. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I recall a friend of mine using 'utsu' to refer to depression when chatting to me a while back.

And yeah, they do unfortunately tend to adopt English words without a need. It drives me insane. It may sound stupid, but it's why I'm all the more driven to learn real Japanese and use no katakana English unless absolutely necessary. I love kanji and find it so much more logical and appealing than katakana adaptations of English.

By the way, I hope again that nothing I've said sounds impolite or authoritative. I'm horrible at integrating into forums and I think when I'm discussing a topic I'm passionate about I might come off as impolite. I'm sorry.

well i see no impoliteness. and if you're talking about japanese and you happen to sound authoritative, then as far as i'm concerned you are, because i can't tell anyway

yesterday i was looking up the word "unrelatable", because my spellchecker doesn't know it. it looks like my dictionary doesn't know it either. but if i google it, it seems to be common. so it's a word. but then i realized: while in english it seems a little ambiguous whether unrelatable is a "valid" word or not, in portuguese there's no translation for the word relatable either

taking it very literally, i could say that the translation is "relacionável". but not only is it not in the dictionary, it also really doesn't convey the same meaning. more like "relationable". makes me think of abstract things that allow you to determine a logical relationship between them, not someone you can sympathize and identify with

Am a native English speaking American, and I must say that I have never used the word "unrelatable" in my life!

Lol!

Have never heard it uttered in real life. And I am pretty sure that I had never seen it in print, nor in online text before reading the above post before either.

lol, the second result i get when i google it (even in "incognito" mode) is "is unrelatable a word?"

i guess that's a lexical gap being filled as we speak (pun intended )

How do you use "unrelatable" in sentences (since, apparently you are the one person on Earth who does use it)?

same way as you use "relatable", except meaning the opposite

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/unrelatable