尋找適合你的 英語 教師……
Nikolett Berki
專業教師Tell me about a word that doesn't have an equivalent in your own language!
They say the languages we speak determine the way we think. Languages reflect the speakers' cultural and historical heritage. Therefore, the more languages we speak, the richer our knowledge is about the world!
Have you ever come across a word in a foreign language that doesn't have an equivalent in your mother tongue? Or have you ever wondered how to say a word in a foreign language just to find out it doesn't have a direct translation? Leave a comment and share it with the others!
For example, I love the English word "ajar". It describes a door/window which is only slightly open and it does not exist in my language (Hungarian).
On the other hand, my favourite Hungarian word is "madárlátta". Literally translating to "has been seen by a bird" (madár = bird, látta = he/she/it has seen), we usually use this adjective to describe food that someone took with her- or himself on a journey but brought it back instead of eating it. Like a sandwich that you take on a day trip and end up taking back home. While this word is rarely used in real life and appears mainly in fairy tales, we all know its meaning and never question its existence 😁
Can you give some examples of other very rare or very specific words? Let's see how many we can collect here :)
2020年8月7日 16:04
留言 · 15
4
Simone: I'm pretty sure we (the English) steal all of the best words from German. German seems to so often have words for abstract feelings and states that require quite complex descriptions in English.
Schadenfreude is a personal favourite. Maybe there's a better translation, but as far as I know it requires a sentence in English (pleasure derived from another's misfortune). I love the idea of this whole concept pulled together in a single word.
A friend also taught me treppenwitz recently, which I love.
2020年8月7日
4
Thank you for sharing madárlátta, I love it. I learned a tiny bit of Hungarian a while ago and it's always nice to come back to it :)
I couldn't agree more with Nikola about "random". I often use it even when I speak German because there is just no good equivalent. Same for "awkward" - in German there is "unangenehm", but it doesn't capture the feeling of social discomfort quite as well.
I can contribute a few German ones. Some of them must exist in some form in one language or another, but they're nice nonetheless:
Kummerspeck - fat you gained due to being sad, literally grief/sadness bacon
Leidensgenosse - a fellow sufferer, literally a comrade (Genosse) in suffering/pain (Leiden). It's often used in a positive way, e. g. if you have to study a lot, but you're doing it together with a friend who shares your fate, you're happy to have a Leidensgenosse.
Ohrwurm - I think nowadays "earworm" can be used in colloquial English for referring to a catchy song that gets suck in your head, but as far as I know, it's originally German.
verschlimmbessern - This is a fairly recent creation, I think, but I like it: Making something worse while trying to improve it (verbessern = to improve, schlimm = bad, terrible).
Unwort - An "un-word", that is to say, a word or expression that shouldn't be used. Every year a panel of linguists chooses the German "un-word" of the year, which is usually a recently coined or popularized expression that reflects discriminatory or antidemocratic developments and ideas. You can find a list of all the "winners" here: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un-word_of_the_year" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un-word_of_the_year</a>;
2020年8月7日
3
@Simone: Bodybag is a new one on me and indeed quite unfortunate :)
I will be sure to bring this up with my German friend the next time we're discussing who wins the language wars!
2020年8月8日
3
Another favourite of mine is Spanish sobremesa (sobre = on/over, mesa = table), for the tradition of staying at the table after a meal to talk and relax.
@Duncan: Schadenfreude and Treppenwitz are good ones too. For those not familiar with Treppenwitz, it's a clever thought (Witz: joke nowadays, but originally wit, cleverness) that comes to you too late - when you're already on the stairs (Treppe). Apparently we stole it from French: l'esprit de l'escalier.
<em>A bit off topic: Duncan, to be fair, German also steals a lot from English, and often in a bad way, culminating in the atrocity that is Denglisch: Handy for mobile phone, Bodybag for messenger bag (not that common, but very unfortunate) and many more... I once saw a jumper in a shop window that was labelled "Sweaty".</em>
@Nikolett: I'm not surprised that Hungarian, as a fellow creator of compound words, has a word similar to Ohrwurm :) The concept behind ours is exactly the same, Ohrwurm means earwig too (I grew up calling them Ohrenkneifer, ear pincher, but apparently that's a regional/colloquial variant).
2020年8月8日
3
In Japanese 人気 and モテる both mean popular but モテる means you are popular because you are fancied by a lot of people. There is no one word for this in English (at least to my knowledge) which I thought was interesting
2020年8月7日
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Nikolett Berki
語言能力
中文, 英語, 德語, 匈牙利語, 其他, 西班牙語
學習語言
中文, 其他, 西班牙語
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