Untranslatable Words: Five Histories Behind the Label

After the Second World War, William Barclay asked the Red Cross and Allied agencies tracing looted property to help find a missing dictionary. The British Military Government’s 21st Army eventually located it in a kitchen cupboard. The manuscript was Thomas Bridges’s Yamana-English dictionary, a record of Yahgan, a language he had learned as a teenager and lived among in Tierra del Fuego. On 9 January 1946, it reached the British Museum. The manuscript had already seemed lost during the First World War and was back with Hestermann by 1929.^[1][4]

A recovered dictionary does not settle what a word means. Mamihlapinatapai, often linked to Bridges’s work, has acquired a famous English gloss, but its printed-dictionary trail is disputed. The gap between the surviving record and the neat version repeated online is where these five histories begin: with speakers, texts, editors and later retellings, rather than a list of linguistic curiosities.

Tierra del Fuego: a word with a disputed gloss

Bridges was born in Bristol and went with his adoptive father to Keppel Island in 1856, when he was thirteen. There he learned Yahgan from people brought from Tierra del Fuego. He later lived in the region from 1869 until his death in 1898. His dictionary grew through repeated copying: the reprint records at least twenty versions before the notebook he called final.^[1] Linguist Ben Molineaux describes him as a near-native speaker and estimates the dictionary at about 30,000 words.^[4]

The word now travels widely through lists of supposedly untranslatable terms. A familiar gloss describes two people each hoping the other will begin something they both desire. The Aikuma Project presents that as one possible reading and offers a morphological analysis: a reciprocal element, a component associated with ambivalence, a change-of-state ending and a dual marker. The analysis points toward a mutual, unsettled situation; the familiar romantic scene remains an interpretation, not a literal dictionary definition.^[3]

Bridges’s practice calls for caution. Aikuma notes that he sometimes recorded possible usages as glosses, which later readers could mistake for fixed meanings. The 1933 Yamana-English edition is real; the present record does not verify that mamihlapinatapai appears as an entry in its printed pages. Guinness later helped popularise it as an exceptionally concise word, while online lists repeated the mutual-look gloss.^[2][3]

The dictionary itself gives us a more grounded example of the problem Bridges was solving. One entry explains a verb through a situation: two people are angry with each other, and a friend of both does not know which one to help. The example gives a practical context for the word, rather than a claim about Yahgan thought as a whole.^[1]

Publication came late. In an 1879 letter, Bridges counted 622 pages and about 23,000 words in a dictionary he had just completed. Seven years later, he estimated 32,430 words by multiplying 1,081 pages by an average of 30 words per page. The totals come from different versions and counting methods, so they do not represent one fixed entry count.^[1] When the Belgica expedition reached the Bridges family’s farm at Harberton in 1898, scientist Frederick A. Cook offered to arrange publication in the United States. Bridges died that July. The manuscript later passed through Ferdinand Hestermann, a professor at Münster, and appeared in 1933 as a Yamana-English edition edited with Martin Gusinde. The first print run was three hundred copies, paid for by the family.^[1]

Yahgan is now classed as dormant following the death of Cristina Calderón in 2022, its last fluent speaker. Molineaux notes that much of what is known about the language was recorded in the late nineteenth century, often by Bridges. The dictionary’s survival is therefore significant, but it is also mediated: one scholar’s notes cannot substitute for the full range of a community’s speech.^[4]

Portugal: saudade moves from a king’s book to a nation’s story

In 1438, King Duarte wrote Leal Conselheiro, “The Loyal Councillor,” including a discussion of melancholy. In chapter 25 he wrote that suidade seemed so apt that Latin and other languages he knew had nothing like it. Wilson A. Paiva’s historical study follows the word’s shifting forms and argues that later writers continued to treat it as difficult to render in another language.^[5]

Its roots are not mysterious. Paiva traces spellings such as suidade, soidade and sodade to Latin solitas, “loneliness,” while noting a competing proposal for an Arabic connection. Galician has a related word, morriña, sometimes described in popular accounts as a longing so powerful it can kill. That dramatic gloss belongs to a tradition of telling the word’s story, not to a literal measure of feeling.^[5][6]

Definitions have multiplied. Duarte Nunes de Leão called saudade the memory of something accompanied by desire for it. In 1912, A. F. G. Bell described a constant wish for something that does not, and perhaps cannot, exist. Both definitions help, but neither carries all the historical associations later writers attached to the word.^[5][6]

One such history follows the disappearance of King Sebastian after the 1578 Battle of Alcácer Quibir in Morocco. His body was never found, and Portugal later entered a sixty-year union with Spain. Belief that Sebastian would return became known as Sebastianism. Paiva traces the hope through writers and political movements, including António Vieira and the Brazilian War of Canudos. Here saudade is tied to public memory as well as private longing.^[7][5]

In the early twentieth century, Portuguese writers developed saudosismo, a literary and artistic movement associated with Teixeira de Pascoaes. His definition of the feeling as longing for a loved one made bitter by absence became one influential account. Paiva also follows the word through fado and Brazilian music. Brazil marks 30 January as a day of saudade, though that date is not widely observed in Portugal.^[5][6]

The word’s force changes with who uses it, what is being remembered, and the story told around it; Duarte’s account of melancholy and Sebastianism’s public memory are distinct histories.

Japan: mono no aware and the falling blossom

Mono no aware is often rendered “the pathos of things.” Graham Parkes and Adam Loughnane explain the phrase as a response to things’ transience. In Heian-era usage, aware could be an exclamation of measured surprise, like “ah” or “oh.” Over time, the phrase became associated with recognising how passing things can move us.^[8][9]

The scholar Motoori Norinaga brought the idea into literary criticism in the eighteenth century. He applied it to The Tale of Genji and the older Man’yōshū, arguing that mono no aware lay at the heart of Genji. Cherry blossoms offered one example: their brief flowering and fall could make their beauty more affecting.^[8][9]

Norinaga was not the first Japanese writer to use the blossom’s fading as a measure of feeling. In Essays in Idleness, the fourteenth-century monk Yoshida Kenkō asks how things could move us if they never faded like the dew at Adashino. Parkes and Loughnane also discuss the tea ceremony, where repaired or imperfect utensils may be valued above flawless ones.^[8] The examples belong to particular literary and aesthetic traditions; the phrase should not be used as a shortcut for describing all Japanese experience. Norinaga’s cherry blossoms and Kenkō’s dew do related work, but they come from distinct texts and periods. Their relationship is made by readers who carry one image into another, not by a single fixed translation of the phrase.

Ubuntu in Zulu and South African debate

In Zulu, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu is commonly rendered “a person is a person through other persons.” Related forms appear in several Bantu languages, but the family resemblance does not make every use identical. Fainos Mangena’s account in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy focuses on Southern African discussions and surveys meanings including humaneness, ethical conduct and interdependence.^[10][11]

The history of ubuntu as an explicit philosophical term is relatively recent. Written uses appear in South African sources in the nineteenth century; in the 1950s, Jordan Kush Ngubane presented it as a philosophy in African Drum. S. and T. M. Samkange’s 1980 book Hunhuism or Ubuntuism developed it as a philosophical idea. These histories locate the discussion in particular writers and periods rather than making “Ubuntu” a shorthand for the many histories of an entire continent.^[10][11]

The term entered South African constitutional language in the 1993 interim Constitution, whose closing passage called for understanding rather than vengeance, reparation rather than retaliation, and ubuntu rather than victimisation. Legal scholar Freddy Mnyongani later examined what that use meant within South African jurisprudence. The word’s public life therefore includes law and political transition, not only a proverb about community. The constitutional passage used ubuntu within a specific national effort to reckon with division and its aftermath. That history belongs alongside the later philosophical discussion, rather than being used as proof that every community in Southern Africa shares one doctrine.^[12]

Its later interpretation remains contested. Archbishop Desmond Tutu connected ubuntu to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Mangena also discusses critics who argue that political actors used the idea selectively. N. Mboti has challenged familiar definitions as deliberately vague. The familiar proverb is translatable; debate concerns what it demands in practice and who gets to define it.^[11][10]

Germany: Waldeinsamkeit in a song and a story

Waldeinsamkeit joins Wald, forest, to Einsamkeit, solitude or loneliness. DWDS marks it as elevated in register and illustrates it with retreating to the forest for recovery; Wiktionary describes it as poetic and now uncommon.^[14][15]

Ludwig Tieck helped popularise the word in his 1797 tale Der blonde Eckbert. Bertha grows up in the forest with an old woman and a bird that lays a precious stone each day. Its song begins and ends with Waldeinsamkeit. When Bertha leaves, she kills the bird; later, the song returns as Eckbert finds his way back to the woods. In Tieck’s story, the word carries longing, danger and the memory of the forest.^[13][14]

The word travelled beyond the tale. Heinrich Heine used it in Romanzero in 1851; Ralph Waldo Emerson kept the German title for a poem in The Atlantic Monthly in October 1858. Emerson left the German word in his English-language poem, where its meaning emerges through the story around it.^[14][16]

DWDS documents the word in contemporary newspaper usage, while noting an older sense of register. A century-old compound can fade from everyday speech without disappearing from dictionaries or literature. Its trail runs through a fictional bird, a German poem and an American magazine.^[15]

How lists of “untranslatable” words are made

Psychologist Tim Lomas began collecting words for positive emotional states that lack a single English equivalent in 2016. His first paper listed 216 examples. The method began with online lists, then expanded through colleagues and students, dictionaries and scholarly sources. He presented the collection as a starting point, not as a definitive catalogue.^[18]

In a 2017 paper, Lomas defines untranslatability cautiously and calls it a contested construct. He sets out strong and mild versions of linguistic relativity: one says outsiders cannot fully grasp a concept, while the other allows partial understanding. Lomas favours treating the words as invitations to compare concepts, not proof that language walls people off from one another.^[19]

The familiar example hygge shows how lists reproduce their own popularity. Lomas notes that nine popular books about it appeared in 2016. He also calls his own interpretations selective and biased, and describes checking them against dictionaries, scholarship and native speakers. That methodological note matters: even a well-intentioned list is an editor’s construction.^[19]

English itself is full of borrowed words. Lomas cites estimates that loanwords may make up as much as 41 percent of the Oxford English Dictionary’s roughly 600,000 entries. The number depends on what counts as a loan, but the larger point is plain: languages have always carried words across borders and made them their own.^[19]

A dictionary for difficult translations

Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables, edited with Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood, brings philosophical, literary and political terms together across more than a dozen languages. The English edition appeared from Princeton University Press in 2014, after the book’s first publication in French. Its project is not to prove that words cannot be translated, but to show how translation exposes histories and arguments hidden inside apparently equivalent terms.^[17]

Cassin’s project makes that method visible at reference-book scale. Its entries place a term beside its history, uses and translations, allowing readers to follow where apparent equivalents part company. A dictionary of this kind does not offer a final English answer for every word. It gives a reader enough context to ask a better question: what has this word meant in this text, to these writers, at this moment?^[17]

A translation is often best treated as a proposal that can be tested in context. What was the speaker doing with the word? Which text or conversation preserves it? Does another use support the same gloss, or does it point somewhere else? The dictionary entries, poems and constitutional language in these examples answer those questions differently. The comparison becomes more interesting when the differences remain visible.^{[1][5][8][12][17]}

That is the useful lesson of these five histories. Mamihlapinatapai reaches us through an uncertain dictionary trail; saudade carries a political and literary history; mono no aware belongs to a particular line of criticism; ubuntu has a South African philosophical and legal debate; and Waldeinsamkeit survives in literature and lexicography. Each can be explained in English. None arrives without the people and records that shaped its meaning.

Thomas Bridges’s dictionary ended in a glass case. His son Lucas later recalled seeing it displayed in an illuminated case in the building that also held the Codex Sinaiticus. The first notebook was copied between January 1865 and May 1866; the unfinished final volume, headed “new and last dictionary,” began in 1879. What survives is not a secret key to an entire language, but a record made by one person among Yahgan-speaking communities—and a reminder to read every translation through the history of its making.^[1]