Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world
Hello Everyone,
It’s late May in Berlin. Which means the city is doing that thing where it offers you everything great all at once; long lit days, warm evenings, tables outside, strangers in good moods. And after the winter we all just have to survive every year, it’s the most welcome of changes.
I’ve often thought that this city is bipolar - you can’t believe it’s the same place and people that are grey, sad, and withdrawn from October to March. What I’ve become aware of this year is that underneath all of this joyous summer revelry, there’s a faint thread of something you can’t quite name. A kind of sweetness that aches. The feeling of holding something beautiful while already knowing it won’t last.
Summer in Berlin is spectacular, and spectacularly short. By August you can smell autumn on the way in. We locals know this; so we live outside with a kind of concentrated urgency that honestly confused me when I first arrived. Now I understand it. Every warm evening in Berlin comes with an invisible expiry date.
I never found the English word for this feeling. “Bittersweet” is close but too symmetrical; it implies equal parts, a clean split. “Melancholy” gets the sadness but loses the beauty. “Nostalgia” is for something already gone. This feeling is for something still here, still beautiful, that you know is going away. English doesn’t have a word for it.
Japanese does.
Mono no aware (物の哀れ) (which I’ll come to properly in a moment) is the name for exactly this. The bittersweet awareness that everything is impermanent. The gentle ache of a beautiful thing fading. When I first came across it, something in me found a place to land. Not just because the word captured the feeling, but also because the word told me this: this feeling is real. Real enough, and common enough, that a whole culture decided it needed a name.
That’s what I want to explore today. Twenty words from twenty languages — emotions, sensations, entire ways of being — that exist in other tongues but not in English. And the thing that strikes me about each one: a culture names what it values. A word in a language is a small piece of evidence that something human was happening often enough, and mattering enough, that people agreed to mark it. Which means every word on this list is also evidence about you. You’ve almost certainly felt these things. You just didn’t have a word for it.
If you know someone who’d like to get in on this conversation, especially a friend who speaks a different language, you can share it with them here:
Share Undividing with Karl Dunn
Now, let’s get Undividing…
In 2016, psychologist Tim Lomas at University College London set out to catalogue what he called “positive lexicography” - a compendium of untranslatable words from languages around the world that describe human experiences English has no name for. He expected to find a few dozen. He eventually catalogued over a thousand, drawn from more than eighty languages.
Imagine that. A thousand feelings English missed.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which is one of linguistics’ most debated ideas posits that language doesn’t just describe our experience; it shapes it. The words we have determine, at least in part, what we’re able to perceive and articulate. You can feel something for which you have no word, but it tends to stay murky, hard to hold, harder to communicate. Give it a name and now it’s something you can point to.
There’s a reason Schadenfreude (the German word for the pleasure you take in someone else’s misfortune) has spread into English and into languages everywhere. Once people heard it, they recognised it immediately. The word unlocked something we’d all been experiencing privately, slightly guiltily, and brought it into the light.
As a writer, I’m a bit of a word nerd. I collect these. This article has twenty more of my favourites. I’ve grouped them into themes because the groupings reveal what different cultures decided to look at closely, what they agreed was worth the trouble of naming.
A note on the words: I’ve tried to represent each word accurately and in the spirit it’s used in its culture. Some of these, particularly words like ubuntu, mono no aware, saudade, and hygge, all have rich bodies of writing around them. I’ve simplified, but hopefully not oversimplified. If your language or culture is represented here and I’ve got something wrong, please tell me. Getting it right matters more to me than looking like I know things.
Every culture has a relationship with impermanence. I love how these words explore the different flavours of that.
Mono no aware (Japanese) — The bittersweet awareness of impermanence. The gentle, achingly specific sadness of watching something beautiful fade; cherry blossoms, a season turning, a light changing. Not grief, exactly. Something more tender than that. The awareness that the beauty and the passing are one thing.
Hiraeth (Welsh) — A longing for home that goes beyond homesickness, because the home you’re longing for may not exist anymore, or may never have existed quite the way you’re remembering it. Part nostalgia, part grief, part love for something that can no longer hold you back.
Saudade (Portuguese) — A deep emotional state of nostalgic longing for something absent. For a person, a place, a version of life. The Portuguese say you can feel saudade for something while it’s still present eg for someone who is still alive, a city you haven’t yet left. A kind of pre-emptive grief.
Toska (Russian) — Nabokov, whose Russian and English were both impeccable, described it as “a longing with nothing to long for.” At its deepest, a spiritual anguish; at its lightest, a vague restlessness, a grey ache of the soul with no identifiable cause. The feeling of wanting you-don’t-know-what.
Hüzün (Turkish) — Orhan Pamuk, writing about Istanbul, gave this one its fullest description: a collective melancholy shared by a whole city, a whole culture. Not individual sadness but a communal mood of the weight of history, beauty, and loss absorbed into the air itself. A sadness that belongs to everyone, and to no one.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this category is how many languages went out of their way to name specific acts of closeness.
Ubuntu (Zulu / Nguni Bantu) — The philosophical principle that “I am because we are.” Your personhood is woven from your relationships with others. To diminish another person is to diminish yourself. To help another person is to enlarge yourself. It is both a word and a complete ethics.
Long time Undividing readers may remember Ubuntu from Undividing #22 - 15 Ways To Make Peace From Around The World. Ubuntu is more than a word, it’s a philosophy.
Ya’aburnee (Arabic, يا قبرني) — Literally: “may you bury me.” Said to someone you love so deeply that you can’t imagine surviving them. So you wish, as a gift to yourself, to go first. It’s an extreme declaration of love. It’s also, when you sit with it, one of the most honest things anyone can say to another person.
Sobremesa (Spanish) — The time after a meal when the table hasn’t been cleared yet, the plates are pushed aside, and the conversation goes on. Not the meal. The after. The lingering. The hour when the table holds you all together a little longer.
Talkoot (Finnish) — The act of gathering as a community to help someone with a large task: building a barn, bringing in a harvest, moving house. No one is paid. No one needs to be asked twice. The community simply shows up. There is a word for this in Finnish because it happened enough, and mattered enough, to be named.
Hygge (Danish) — The warmth and ease of being together in a cozy space. Not just comfort, but a specific quality of togetherness. The lit candle, the people you love, the feeling that here, right now, nothing bad can reach you. Just enough warmth and enough people.
What happens in the space between two people, what is said without words is so rich a territory that it’s been named from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic. Apparently we all love to feel this.
Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan, Tierra del Fuego) — A look exchanged between two people who both want the same thing and neither wants to be the first to initiate it. The entire negotiation, the desire and the hesitation and the unspoken question, conducted entirely through eye contact.
Nunchi (Korean, 눈치) — The subtle, almost instinctive ability to read any room. To sense what other people are feeling without being told. To know when to speak and when to be quiet, when to stay and when to leave, what someone needs before they know they need it. In Korean culture, good nunchi is a social superpower; bad nunchi is considered a character fault.
Iktsuarpok (Inuktitut / Inuit) — The restless anticipation that makes you keep going to the window or door to check whether someone is coming. The impatient, hopeful, slightly anxious state of waiting for a person. You have definitely felt this. The Inuit named it.
Forelsket (Norwegian) — The overwhelming euphoria of the early stage of falling in love. Not love itself which hopefully comes later. This is the before: the electricity, the absurd happiness, the way everything looks different. The Norwegians decided this specific, fleeting, unmistakeable experience deserved its own word.
Yuán fèn (Mandarin Chinese, 缘分) — The fate or invisible thread that connects people who were meant to meet. When you encounter someone and the connection feels inexplicably immediate like a stranger who becomes a friend in an afternoon, or a person who arrives exactly when you needed them. That is yuán fèn at work. The universe’s matchmaking.
What we feel on the inside as private, specific, and sometimes absurd. Not everything important is big. Some feelings are small or even ridiculous, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve to be owned with a name.
Meraki (Greek, μεράκι) — Doing something with such soul and love that a piece of yourself goes into it. The quality of complete creative investment in a meal, a painting, a conversation, a gesture. When someone has made something with meraki, you can feel it. It is the opposite of phoning it in.
Fernweh (German) — Farsickness: the ache to be somewhere far away. The opposite of homesickness. A longing not for where you’ve been, but for somewhere you’ve never been. Somewhere distant and unknown that pulls at you. The feeling, standing at a window, that your life is happening in the wrong place.
Litost (Czech) — A state of torment created by the sudden sight of your own misery. The sting that happens when something small like a throwaway comment, a comparison, or a glimpse in a mirror shows you yourself in a way you just can’t bear. Part shame, part self-pity, part rage at being made to see it.
Gigil (Tagalog / Filipino) — The overwhelming, almost uncontrollable urge to squeeze or pinch something because it is so unbelievably cute. A baby, a puppy, a small sleeping thing. The Filipino language named the physical compulsion that cuteness produces. It’s the urge your hands have, independent of your brain, to grab and hold what is adorable.
Abbiocco (Italian) — The drowsy, heavy-lidded sleepiness that descends specifically after a big meal. Not tiredness though, this is a targeted, insistent, entirely pleasant drowsiness. The body’s eloquent, immediate response to being properly fed. The Italians named the nap the food calls you towards.
Words exist because experiences are common enough to name. Communities notice things, agree they keep happening, and eventually someone says: we need a word for this.
Which is, when you think about it, a profoundly Undividing idea. The things that make us feel most alone — the particular grief you can’t explain, the specific joy you can’t quite hold, the feeling that something is ending before it ends — are not private failings. They are feelings so widely shared that cultures on the other side of the world, sometimes even thousands of years ago, decided they needed a word for it.
You are not the only one who feels the bittersweet weight of a summer evening. You are not the only one who sits at a table not wanting to leave. You are not the only one who has looked at someone and wanted them to bury you, in the Arabic sense — loved them so much you’d rather go first.
We’ve all been in good universal company all along.
Something a little different this week, and I’ll keep it short.
Use one. Pick one word from this list that names something you’ve been feeling without a name. Use it this week. Say it to someone. Put it in a text. Write it down. The act of naming makes the experience real. It tells your nervous system: yes, that happened, it counts.
Look at what the word reveals about the culture. Talkoot exists in Finnish because Finnish communities had a practice of collective labour. Nunchi exists in Korean because Korean culture has a particular sensitivity to social harmony. Ubuntu exists in Zulu because Zulu philosophy placed community at the centre of personhood. The word is a window into a way of seeing the world. And it’s a window any of us can borrow and look at our own lives through.
Talk to the people in your life who speak other languages about what their language has that yours doesn’t. This is, I promise, one of the best conversations you can have. Almost everyone who speaks more than one language has a word they mourn when they have to switch. Ask them what it is.
So many of the ones you’ve read here today came up in conversations I had with native speakers. And by the end of each talk, I understood them in a more complex way than I ever had.
And this is where I need your help.
I have twenty words here, from twenty languages. But there are over seven thousand languages in the world. And I’m working from the ones that linguists and translators have already written about in English. I am absolutely certain that your language has a word that English doesn’t. A word for a feeling that your grandmother used, or that your community uses, or that you’ve known as a concept your whole life.
Leave a comment and tell us what it is.
The word, the language, what it means, and if you’re willing a sentence or two about when you feel it. I and probably a lot of readers will go through all of these. Because I love knowing more about who we all are.
There is a version of this story where untranslatable words are just a charming internet listicle. Twenty-word slideshows. Things you forward to people. Nice to know, quickly forgotten.
I think they’re far more than that.
I think they are evidence. That the feelings we’ve been embarrassed about, or couldn’t explain, or thought were particular to us are shared. Have been noticed and named by people who never met us, in places we may never go, in languages we don’t speak.
You have not been alone in any of this. You have just been in a language that didn’t have that feeling named.
Which means all of us are bigger than our culture, bigger than the languages we grew up with, bigger than all the things that separate us into boxes.
We feel this world, together.
If this one landed, share it with someone whose language is different from yours. This one was made to travel.
And please — leave your word in the comments. Tell me what your language knows that English doesn’t.
Like, comment and restack! It all helps the algo push Undividing into people’s feeds.
Have you learned anything in Undividing that’s helped you in your life? Given you a new perspective? Helped you feel connected to the good in all of us? If so, consider taking out a paid subscription.
You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 60 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)
You can also support by picking up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.