10 Of The Best Words In The World (That Don't Translate Into English)

There are certain words in every language that convey meanings that are unique to a specific culture. In this article, the Guardian correspondents take up words from Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Persian, Italian, Russian, Dutch, German, and Finnish, and depict and evaluate their "deep" meanings.

The words selected truly take you on a voyage across cultures. Some of them have meanings that are difficult to convey even when put in entire paragraphs of text. For example the Chinese word "tiáo". Madeleine Thien strives to describe "tiáo" as follows:

Unlike French or German, gender does not provide categories in Chinese, which groups things by something else entirely: shape.Tiáo is one of at least 140 classifiers and measure words in the Chinese language. It’s a measure word for long-narrow-shape things. For example, bed sheets, fish, ships, bars of soap, cartons of cigarettes, avenues, trousers, dragons, rivers.

Thien goes on to offer clues about what tiáo means "beyond the word" in the Chinese culture:

Philosopher Wang Lianqing charts how tiáo was first applied to objects we can pick up by hand (belts, branches, string) and then expanded outward (streets, rivers, mountain ranges). And finally tiáo extended metaphorically. News and events are also classified with tiáo, perhaps because news was written in long vertical lines, and events, as the 7th-century scholar Yan Shigu wrote, arrive in lists “one by one, as (arranging) long-shaped twigs”.

Other examples, like "bella figura" from Italian, "shoganai" from Japanese, "toska" from Japanese, "ta’arof" from Persian, "Feierabend" from German, "sobremesa" from Spanish, or "sisu" from Finnish, give insight into the respective cultures, and the histories of the countries in question; and even the problems and issues they are facing, as well as their politics.

Overall, this is an upbeat and entertaining read.