..and give a brief explanation.

[Link] , danish hygge...cosy comfortable state of mind.

Karoshi , japanese, work yourself to death. Scary.

schadenfreude,German. to take pleasure at the misery of others. Barely qualifies as it now makes a regular appearance in English texts.

Le Petit-Morte - french. That sleepy collapse that people do just after finish 'doing some Sport in the bedroom'.

LADHAR (“LAY-yer”) irish.
The gap between your fingers or your toes is your ladhar. A ladhar bóthair is a fork in the road.

Schmuck..yiddish, the discarded foreskin after circumcision, not a nice name to call anybody.

The Eskimo-Sami languages have up to 300 different words for snow. Depending on the type and the context.

[Link]

[Link]

[Link]

[Link]

what others ?

Edited by PalazioVecchio (09 Apr 2018 7.16pm)

Eze Peasy at Anfield....

I'm in the Canaries at the moment and there are a lot of watch shops selling Schmuck Watches.

I'm glad that I didn't buy one

Canary Islands ?

go and do some research on the whistling dialect of the hill farmers. They could have whole conversations across miles of gorge, by whistling...now go and get google translate to put that into English.

Eze Peasy at Anfield....

It occurs to me that geographical terms denoting features that aren't common or present at all in a language's area aren't readily represented in that language and this gets interesting when global travel becomes commonplace.

Welsh cwm is often given in English as corrie, but that is a Gaelic word, or as cirque, which is French. The highest and widest crevasse (French) on a glacier (also French) is the Bergschrund and it separates the glacier proper from the Firn or Ferner (all German). Glacier-carved sea inlets like sea lochs (Gaelic) but bigger and deeper are fjords (Norwegian). Different types of lava field are denoted with terms either from Icelandic or Hawaiian. A flat plateau of a kind found in southern Africa is a veldt (Afrikaans).

It works the other way too; the rolling hills of southern England have a particular character and are called downs. Hills of similar size in Russia (for example) are a vozvyshchennost', but that word doesn't translate downs, both because its etymology is different and because the hills are of different character.

Words which really have "no translation" in (say) English don't usually last all that long; eventually one of two things happens; either the concept is no longer a "thing" and gets forgotten, so translation is not required; or else the word is borrowed into the other language either as a straight loan or as a loan translation. German loves loan translations. We usually borrow the words straight and mangle their pronunciations. Specialist terminologies I suppose are an exception, e.g. the different techniques of judo, the flora and fauna of Madagascar, or the components of Highland traditional dress.

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The Ferret
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Nouns in -ns in Latin regularly inflect by making the -s into -t-, as mons "mountain" plural montes, pons "bridge" pontifex "priest" (the "bridge" between you and God). Sometimes we borrow from Latin either directly or via (Norman) French words derived from different inflections of the same Latin word. Similarly, -r -> -rd- cor "heart" gives us "core" (from the nominative singular cor) and "cordial" (from the adjective cordialis which in turn derives from the genitive cordis); and -rd- -> rs ardeo "I burn" gives us "ardent" from ardere (infinitive) and "arson" from arsus (past participle). (Incidentally "coronary" does not come from cor "heart" despite its connection with cardiology. It comes from corona "crown", the same place as our word for the gaseous envelope surrounding the Sun).

My favourite is "dependent" (adjective) and "dependant" (noun). I have dependent children who are my dependants. All sorts of supposedly learned people get this wrong. Many years ago I had to draft a form involving these two terms (it was asking people about their financial circumstances) and it was sent to a certain civil servant who thought he knew the lot. He amended it so that the two words were spelled arbitrarily, as if the choice of spelling were a matter of taste (although even if that were the case, he should have been consistent). We wrote to him telling him the rule mentioned above, and advising him to spell the form correctly, as I had drafted it. He wrote back that he "was a Grade 7" and therefore his word was law. He then printed and circulated a million copies and sent the resulting letters of complaint to me to answer.

We wrote to his Minister's private office enclosing the correspondence containing our advice and his arse was kicked from one end of the Central Line to the other.

This is quite interesting: [Link]

Edited by chateauferret (10 Apr 2018 10.57pm)

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The Ferret
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turn the car right, i have the legal right to blah blah.

tournez la bagnole a droit, j'ai la droit.

vuelve la coche a direcha, tengo la direcha.

works the same in all three languages, right ? except for my crappy speling

Eze Peasy at Anfield....