Asking non-native English speakers.
It always felt weird to me that English has no distinct phrase to express non-romantic affection.
English speakers use “I love you”, but in Italian (and many other languages) you’d make a distinction between a romantic partner and a friend/relative/whatever.
Ti amo = I love you, said for example to your partner, signifies a deep emotional bond, not something you usually say lightly.
Ti voglio bene = I love you, but less charges, more in a “I feel good about you” way
I always appreciated Spanish’s Te quiero vs te amo to express to friends my feelings for them, much better than “I love you, no homo”.
Way too many for Chinese (think every Chinese dish you know), but the one world I think about the most in this context these days is 老百姓 (lao3 bai3 xing4) (Also see a somewhat related Wikipedia article). Direct translation is “ol’ hundred surnames”
It’s… a non-formal word for the “commoners” or the “average person”. This is a concept I don’t hear in mainstream media that much nowadays. I don’t think most news or mainstream media even refers to say the entirety of the lower to middle social class in one word… (Note that it is different from “Average Joe”, which does have a Chinese counterpart which translates to “Zhang three Li four”)
On top of it, the whole concept of “a hundred surnames” representing most of society is kind of absurd in English-speaking countries. Societies with historical Chinese influences tend to have lots of ppl share the same surnames
I recently came across a word that I couldn’t find a translation for. In Swedish, the word “skallgång” refers to the act of walking in a line formation in a search party.
Doch
There exists no english equivalent for doch, it has multiple functions, the most known one being an expression that emphatically negates a previous sentiment.
“Does not!”
“Does too!!”Which created one of the most long lived german memes.
“It should not be that way, but it was.”
It fills a big gap in English because there is no single English word to unambiguously answer a question like:
“So you don’t want me to come over this afternoon?”
There would be, if people were able to understand the concept of single negation. But in practice, any single word answer to that question will likely lead to confusion or misunderstanding.
Came here for doch. Its one of my favourite words im using arguing with AFD voters and works every time its like a spell.
German: Tja
Can mean nesrly anything from schadenfreude to deep empathy
Tja
Isn’t that literally “oh, well”? And the intonation changes if thats empathy or schadenfreude.
Curiously, schadenfreude does not translate to English well :)
The closest English word to shadenfreude is epicaricasy, I believe.
Dreich - there is no direct English equivalent. It’s weather that’s wet and cold and dark and grey and unchanging. It can also mean depressing and tedious for obvious reasons.
Dreary
Dreary is not necessarily wet or cold.
I would never call hot weather “dreary”
Maybe not, but dark, grey, overcast weather might well be dreary. But it wouldn’t be dreich.
Ah, so there has to be active precipitation.
I love it, but if I were to translate it to English, I’d say “miserable”. Works for weather (miserable weather is wet and cold and dark and bleh), and it covers the other use cases?
Gloomy
Gloomy is not necessarily wet or cold.
Kinda a reversal, but I’m curious if other languages have a word as versatile as English’s “fuck”. Like obviously other languages have words for the verb of making sex, but is it common for it to also be a noun, adjective, or adverb to the point where you could have it as every other word and it still be grammatically correct?
In Dutch, the word “kanker” can be used as verb, noun or adjective. Example: Die kanker hoer kan opkankeren met die kanker van haar. Which best translates to something like: That fucking whore can fuck off with that shit of hers. Except that the Dutch version is wayyyyy more rude and inappropriate.
Fuck the fucking fuckers.
The Hungarian adjective “ügyes”. It’s used to describe someone when they do something ably/skillfully/cleverly. (Doesn’t necessarily imply a learned ability, can be innate.) It usually implies an activity involving manual dexterity, but can also be used for mental problem-solving.
When used as an exclamation, it basically means “Well done!”
In Spanish.
Sobremesa, the period you stay at the table after lunch or dinner having a coffee or some drinks while chatting.Aprovechar, is basically the opposite of to waste. So depending on the context is to take advantage of something, to make the most of, make a good use, give a second use or reuse leftovers for something else.
Sobremesa
It’s weird there’s no English word for that, now that you point it out, since it’s a pretty common thing.
Estrenar: to use/wear something brand new for the very first time. Sometimes when you are estrenando white shoes your classmates in school would try to step on them so they no longer look new.
Botellon: just drinking and socializing outside, usually something a group of underage kids/young people would do. Not a party, not simply getting drunk. Like hanging out but with some alcohol.
The old-school English word for aprovechar was “thrift” or being thrifty. These days I hear it used mostly in the specific sense of saving cash. I don’t often hear it much anymore in terms of conserving resources, but that is where it came from, and if you use it in that sense people will understand you.
As for sobremesa, that’s not something I’ve enjoyed enough for it to have its own word, unfortunately.
Second one is “appreciate” in English.
Not really. “Aproverchar” means more like “I have this things that I would normally throw out but I will used for X instead”. You wouldn’t say “I had some left over chicken so I appreciated it to make corquetas”.
Closer to “appropriate” (the verb, not the adjective) but still not quite, it’s too formal
It’s not quite that either. The spanish word for “appropriate” is “apropiar”, and the meaning is the same. Aprovechar has a different meaning.
I second the person before you, that is literally
appreciate (a thing)
Kindergarten
This is proof that Germans do have humour!
That is correct, but we spell it without the second “u”.
And capitalized
That’s how you get kids:
Sow the seed, wait a few years until they are sprouting. Then you pick them up and keep them at home until mature.
Does it count if English just steals your words?
Schadenfreude, Zeitgeist, Weltanschauung, Kindergarten.
Doppelganger, wanderlust, poltergeist…
Stein… oh wait no, spiel… oops not quite
Blitzkrieg?
Blitzkrieg translates pretty well doesn’t it? Fast war?
Lightning being the literal translation but used in the same way as fast.
I always assumed lightning war was just a way of making it sound more interesting, I didn’t realise blitz just meant lightning
The problem is when they steal a word and then change the meaning.
You don’t want to go down that road.
“beamer, handy, mobbing, shooting…”English words, yes? What about them?
I guess you don’t speak German, as those are now German words that you might not be able to guess their meanings
Perhaps if the meaning is different or altered from the actual word.
Looking forward to “woonerf.”
Angst, although that one became more of a false friend: Fear of the unknown vs Teenage BS
Zeitgeist works well as “spirit of the times”; Weltanschauung as “worldview”; and Kindergarten as “pre-school”.
That’s what English does. Why do you think OP is asking?
It’s what every language does, to some extent. You’d really struggle to say, “I was working from home, sending emails and providing feedback, and during a meeting with my team and the marketing manager, the internet died” in German without stuffing the sentence to the brim with English loanwords.
The french: Je ne suis pas d’accord
Je travaillais depuis chez moi, j’envoyais des courriel et je faisais des retours, et au cours d’une réunion avec mon équipe et le directeur commercial, la connexion Internet a lâché.
Plenty in French too! And this is just English; my point is that loanwords are super common.
“Kombinować” very Polish word for a very Polish a activity/philosophy. To make things work / get something done / take care of something in way that work for us, but are not the expected way to do things (though, ‘kombinowanie’ is often actually expected). It might be doing a job using the tools that are available and not thise that should be used, it might be a genuine invention, It might be using your contacts for favour (like getting a doctor appointment), it might be plain cheating.
A little bit like ‘hacking’ and also can be a good thing or a bad thing.
“Wykombinuję coś” = “don’t worry I will take care of that” “Co za kombinator” = “what a cheaty bastard”
Czech edition of the world is: zbastlit and the resulting product is bastl.
close cousin to jury-rig
Dude, the word you’re looking for in English is to hustle.
Source: am Polish.
In Spanish that would be “picaresca” and Spanish people also think it’s something that doesn’t really exist in other cultures.
There’s also scheming, but i don’t think either one is a 1 to 1 equivalent.
Scheming nie działa, bo kombinowanie to dużo więcej niż samo knucie planów :)
But I am also not so sure that kombinować is a good example because the other meanings are because it’s a homonym.
I am having trouble providing what actually OP asked for.
A few years ago I’d say Maori “mana”, but the kids now call it “aura” and it’s a direct concept translation.
Russian is more productive than English, so there’s a bunch of “we just smushed a bunch of prefixes and suffixes on it” words that don’t have a great English equivalent, like недоперепить – to drink quite a lot but not succeed at drinking too much. I don’t think we properly have листопад which is the equivalent of “snowfall” but for autumn leaves. I really miss успевать – to successfully have enough time to do something. There’s also кипяток – water that has been boiled but then slightly cooled, like 200-205 degrees F. The canonical examples are тоска , which is a kind of melancholy longing, and авось which expresses optimism but I basically never heard anyone actually say.
Never hearing anyone express optimism feels like a very Russian stereotype.
It does seem on-brand.
I think авось has a general meaning similar to “god willing”, or “with some luck”, not simply some optimism. Like “авось успеем” -> “with some luck, we can make it in time”. I do agree it’s an old-fashioned word which I haven’t really heard in a while.
As someone who speaks the exact bare minimum amount of Russian to get by in Estonia (so basically hello, please, thank you, fuck you, good bye), there’s a couple Russian words of the “not in front of your babushka” type that IMO lose a bit of character when translated to the English phrases that mean the same thing:
похуй - universal answer whenever someone raises a concern
хуйня - very versatile word
I’ll let you do the honor of translating them.
very versatile word
So, pretty much anything and sometimes exact opposite thing 🥲
Pretty much.
In the context of how I hear it used in Estonia at least, it both means something is very annoying, or it means it’s so unimportant it doesn’t matter. It also just means “thingamajig”. I suspect there are use cases I can’t think of right now or ones that I don’t even know.
Similar thread long ago, there was a word Somewhere in northern Europe that meant something like “aimlessly hitting your penis on things”. .
Do you mean the Dutch word “swaffelen” or “zwaffelen”?
Sounds like it yeah! I’m a big fan of the concept.
Apparently its from Netherlands?
It at the very least got popular in the Netherlands. This was due to a youtube upload from 2008 of a Dutch student who was proud to be the first person to swaffel the Taj Mahal. This resulted in more people swinging their dicks against various monuments.
So if you see a popular monument, remember that it is likely a Dutch person filmed themselves while wacking their dick against it and put it on youtube somewhere.
In British English it’s called “Dicking things” (Sarah Millican has a comedy video about it IIRC?) :P
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