That sort of painful, sort of bittersweet, sort of wistful feeling you get looking out the window or driving at night or listening to a far-off train whistle? There's a word for that in Japanese.
Posted 01.04.2013 at 5:01 pm
19 Comments
Few of us use all--or even most--of the 3,000 English-language words available to us for describing our emotions, but even if we did, most of us would still experience feelings for which there are, apparently, no words.
In some cases, though, words do exist to describe those nameless emotions--they're just not English words. Which is a shame, because--as today's infographic by design student Pei-Ying Lin demonstrates, they often define a feeling entirely familiar to us.
Lin solicited the list of "unspeakable" words from colleagues at London's Royal College of Art, and found that their definitions in English usually came down to something like, "it is a kind of (emotion A), close to (emotion B), and somehow between (emotion C) and (emotion D)."
Next, to visualize the relationship between the foreign emotion-words and English ones, Lin used a linguistics model to map out five basic emotions (large yellow circles), along with several descriptive words related to each (smaller green circles). Finally, she used her sources' descriptions to place the new/foreign words on the English map:
A couple of other good ones that didn't make this map [via So Bad So Good]:
Litost (Czech): a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery
Pena ajena (Mexican Spanish): The embarrassment you feel watching someone else’s humiliation
And, of course:
Schadenfreude (German): the pleasure derived from someone else’s pain
Lin also mapped five emotions that are unique to the computer/internet age, and also--so far, at least--unnamed in English.
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Isn't Schadenfreude basically sadism?
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Wouldn't feeling viistima be the same or similar to feeling lax, detatched, unconcerned, carefree and indifferent?
In the bottom right corner on the first infographic the estonian word "viistima" is misspelled. Correct would be "viitsima". It caught my eye because i'm from estonia ... but all in all it's very cool and informative graph!
No, Schadenfreude isn't sadism. Schadenfreude is normally directed towards a person that has been bad to others. It also needs not to involve actual pain. Maybe it can be best described as the gratification one feels, if something bad happens to a person who has been bad to you or others.
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rcteske,
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These articles, as usual, display the usual ignorance of non-mother tongue English speakers failure to fully grasp the enormity of the English language lexicon when translating words directly from a foreign language.
For example simple , for the Estonian word on the chart, in English it would be listful or listless
the Chinese word next to it, in English would be carefree.
I could quite easily find words for all the other poorly translated attempts. Open a dictionary and start reading it.
Need I remind the writers that the English language has the largest spoken vocabulary in the world, so large, that not even mother tongue speakers of the language will ever know all the words. Most people only know 350 000 words by the age of 30. So it's not surprising how popular these badly researched articles are.
Kirado, I agree. There are some special concepts (like the Czech "litost"), but English does express most of the words. Schadenfreude might take more than 1 word to say, but the person feeling a sense of satisfaction would say the other got his/her comeuppance or just deserts. Many of the other words would be translated differently in English depending on the context; the Russian "toska" would be "depression", "melancholy", "wistfulness" -- depending on the context. The word isn't lacking, the foreign word is just not specific enough for selecting only 1 single equivalent in English.
These articles, as usual, display the usual ignorance of non-mother tongue English speakers failure to fully grasp the enormity of the English language lexicon when translating words directly from a foreign language.
For example simple , for the Estonian word on the chart, in English it would be listful or listless
the Chinese word next to it, in English would be carefree.
I could quite easily find words for all the other poorly translated attempts. Open a dictionary and start reading it.
Need I remind the writers that the English language has the largest spoken vocabulary in the world, so large, that not even mother tongue speakers of the language will ever know all the words. Most people only know 350 000 words by the age of 30. So it's not surprising how popular these badly researched articles are.
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I wouldn't say that Chinese word means "carefree". To me the word is somewhat spiritual, some kind of emotion that maybe is linked with Taoism, an emotional status and a way to treat the things and events around us.
For example, when you lose your wallet with a huge amount of money in it but you think it's not a big deal, people may say you are 豁达. It is usually used to describe someone who don't easily get depressed or dispirited.
A good example of when not to use an Infographic; given the limited connections between domains, simple lists and text would have been much, much easier to navigate, especially as it's relatively simple content.
An important point for those criticizing the article is that it was only reporting on work done by a student. The nature of the content (the infographics) was specific to what was being reported, and the rest was simply commentary by the author. Also, the fact that a concept can be *expressed* in English isn't the same as having a *word* for it in English. It seems to me that the words and descriptions were commonly for emotions that are specific sub-emotions that could be grouped under a certain word (eg homesickness => longing). Having a more specific word could help to more quickly communicate exactly how you are feeling, or understand the feeling yourself.
I especially liked the 'new emotions invented by the Internet'. Having a word for the specific concepts could make discussing them much easier. I might add 'the feeling of waste & lethargy after a long gaming session stops being fun - adjusting to real life the morning after a LAN party'. I have felt that more than once, and sure I could describe it, but having a word for it could be useful. It might even help people to relate it in a more general sense to other forms of over indulgence and the negative side effects. Language is a tool of thought right?
Unique to the Internet, the angry, disappointed, sheepish feeling one gets after going to a Web site to read an article that promises to be interesting, only to find out that one has again been herded into another pointless sideshow by a carnival barker intent on gathering people, only to sell stuff to them.
I agree that carefree is not a good enough translation. Not being bothered by losing a wallet full of cash is better expressed as 'Nonplussed'
How about 'insouciant'? (Love that word) - "lighthearted unconcern"
English is enormously flexible and it is this flexibility that leads to its size. Schadenfreude, for example is a loanword, but it is now just as much an English word as ecstasy (Greek), courage, devout, dignity, excitement (all French), or bravado (Spanish). There are quite literally thousands upon thousands more examples.
This flexibility and ready adaptability is part of what distinguishes English from many other languages. Unlike Spanish, French, and Standard Mandarin, there is no "officially recognized" academic society or governmental department charged with maintaining official linguistic, or grammatical, or lexicographical standards. For many of these ideas, English needs no word because it will simply adopt the foreign word. I'm particularly fond of Hygge. If you like a word, use it and explain what it means.
Nonplussed is a great example of fluidity in English. The word's primary (or original, or formal) meaning is the opposite of what most people think it is. Synonyms for the original meaning would be surprised, bewildered or shocked. It is only in the last few years that the informal usage (nonchalant, unperturbed) has become commonplace.
@pkstephens -- it sounds to me like the "new" usage of 'nonplussed' doesn't indicate a shift in the meaning of the word, but rather that people are using it without understanding what it means.
One could perform this exercise for categories other than emotions, like personality traits or colors. It's not always that a word in one language is "missing" in another, but that existing words have slightly shifted semantic fields. As long as you have enough to cover the semantic space this is no problem. I did quite well without the color "aubergine" until a recent visit to the UK. The overlap in words was used to whittle down via factor analysis a large number of personality descriptors into the five dimensions of human personality:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
I tend to agree with the comments above by Kirado and PKStephens. Russian has its own word for Schadenfreude, but it seems that English has found the concept useful and borrowed the German word.