The Happiness Dictionary: Words from Around the World to Help Us Lead a Richer Life

I think untranslatable words offer us the opportunity to expand our horizons, through simply learning about and questioning that which we were not previously exposed to.

These words, past their initial intrigue, offer us a looking glass into specific cultures. After all, for a culture to come up with a word, something must happen often enough. And for it not to exist in other cultures, it must not have passed that intangible threshold. This very concept means that with untranslatables, we very likely experiencing a... See more

In learning about untranslatable words, we are getting to explore new worlds and through introspection, a window into ours and other people’s underlying “wiring”. We are not just loosely learning about trivial terms, but in certain cases, a lot about ourselves.

the piraha people, who have no abstraction or recursion in their language, no past or future tense, use this word called “xibipiio” to refer to things going in and out of existence: “crossing the border between existence and non-existence” https://t.co/H825Lu3tT1