Fifty words for snow, no word for go
Image: Chris McKenna via Wikimedia Commons (licence)
We’re all familiar with the observation that such-and-such a language has no word for ‘sorry’, or ‘please’, usually made in order to cast a slur on the character of the speakers of such an unsolicitous language. Citation of words such as schadenfreude (shameful joy at the misfortune of others), serves a similar purpose in reverse – they have a word for something nasty which they must be doing all the time, but which we don’t require, as such thoughts never cross our minds.
This Economist language column dwells more deeply on the nature of untranslatability and how some languages force you into a specificity you may not wish. For example, in Russian, if you want to say ‘I went’ (khodila), you can’t express the idea without also conveying information about your gender, mode of travel, and the fact that you also returned — it’s all embedded in the form of the verb. From this, some folk are led to draw conclusions about national character and attitudes being formed out of the strictures of language, but this is a perilous field of inquiry. It would be foolish to conclude, for example, that the predominantly English-speaking West won the Cold War because it has simple, open and unrestrictive forms of the verb ‘to go’.
Still, that doesn’t stop Harvard economics wonk M. Keith Chen postulating an interesting (but probably wrong) theory about speakers of languages with precise syntactic markers for the future tense being more prone to impecunious financial planning (conclusion: it’s preferable to be Finnish or German rather than Spanish or Greek).
But let’s return our attention from the general to the specific. And you can’t get much more specific in a single word than mamihlapinatapei, which means in Yagan (one of the indigenous languages of Tierra del Fuego) ‘the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start.’ It’s a bit of a 2-am-in-a-crowded-bar sort of a word; however, given that the Yagan language has but one surviving native speaker, a lady in her middle eighties named Cristina Calderon, (pictured here wearing an expression that is the opposite of mamihlapinatapei), mamihlapinatapei hasn’t been getting much of a run in the bars of downtown Puerto Williams lately.
.jpg){kind=link}
