Ella Frances Sanders published Lost in Translation in 2014 and I have been given it three times, always by people who love me. It is a pretty book. It is also the cleanest example of a genre I have stopped trusting, and I want to say why before I go ahead and do the same thing myself, at length, with footnotes.
The first problem is selection. The genre only wants words that sound like jewellery. Nobody commissions an illustrated plate for the Twi word akwaaba, which means welcome, because English has welcome and the entry would be over in four letters. So the list is never a list of what a language has. It is a list of what sounds foreign to an English speaker, which is a fact about the reader.
The second problem is a category error, and it is the one that annoys me. "Untranslatable" nearly always turns out to mean "not covered by one English word." Those are different claims, and the second one is ordinary. English does not lack the concept of feeling pleased when someone you dislike has a bad month. English lacks a noun for it, and went to Germany, and borrowed one.
The third problem is that nobody checks. Sankofa circulates as an Akan word meaning something like return to your roots. The word is real. It is built from san, to return, kɔ, to go, and fa, to fetch; it sits inside a proverb about going back for what you left behind; it is an adinkra symbol.1 By the time it reaches a tote bag the grammar has been sanded off and what is left is a general instruction to respect the past. The word survived. The clause did not. This happens to words that get popular, and @nightshift/the-word-resilience-has-been-taken-from-us is about the same wound from the other end.
So here is my list, with the argument attached, because a word without an argument is a souvenir.
Three words I wanted and cut. Two were Levantine phrases about wishing to die before somebody you love, quoted constantly in English, and I could not trace either to anything firmer than other English-language listicles quoting each other. The third was a Twi greeting said to people at work, which I have heard all my life and cannot find in a dictionary I would defend. Failing to source your own childhood is a strange afternoon. I am leaving the hole visible.
naʿīman (نعيماً). Said to somebody who has just had a shower, a bath, a shave or a haircut. The root is the one behind naʿīm, bliss, and in religious use, paradise. The full reply is Allah yinʿam ʿalayk, may God bless you too, though most people say thanks and move on. What English does instead is nothing at all. English is well equipped for arrivals and departures and has almost nothing for the small transitions of the body. My mother said this to me every single time I came out of the bathroom for eleven years. The first time nobody said it, in a shared house in Fallowfield, I stood in the corridor with wet hair for slightly longer than I needed to.
yiʿṭīk el-ʿāfye (يعطيك العافية). May God give you health, said to a person who is working. The man resurfacing the road. The woman on the till. Your father at nine at night with the day's receipts. In Levantine cities it doubles as the thing you say walking into a shop. English has the function and no dedicated form for it, so it spreads the same work across "you alright there", "cheers", and the builder's nod, which is a full speech act performed with the chin.
tislam (تسلم). Literally, may you be kept safe. Used as thank you, and heard far more often than shukran. In my family it usually arrives with the hands attached, may your hands be safe, said to whoever cooked. English has bless your hands sitting in the dictionary in plain view and has never once used it in my hearing. This is my favourite category of gap: not a missing concept, not even a missing phrase, just a phrase English built and then declined to install.
ʿēb (عيب). A noun meaning fault, flaw, blemish, disgrace. Also an interjection, roughly, shame on you. One syllable, no verb, no subject, deployable at a child across a room, and the child stops. English needs a whole sentence for this. We don't do that. The nearest single word is "rude", which is weaker, can be said fondly, and has never in my life stopped me doing anything.
shamāta (شماتة). Pleasure at another person's misfortune. The root gives you the verb too, so you can call a person shāmit: currently enjoying your bad news. English's answer is Schadenfreude, which is to say English's answer is German. I include this one because it dismantles the premise of the genre I am working in. Nothing about the concept was unavailable to English speakers. It was extremely available. There was a hole where the noun goes and English filled it by shopping abroad, which is what languages do, and there is nothing mystical about it.
tʾīl id-damm (تقيل الدم). Heavy of blood. Said of a person the way you would say tall. Tedious, humourless, hard to be near. The predicate form, dammo tʾīl, is his blood is heavy. Its opposite, khafīf id-damm, light of blood, means funny. English has "hard going" and "a bit much" and "heavy weather", and every one of those describes a situation you are in. Arabic puts it in the blood, which makes it a property of the person: constitutional, not their fault, not curable, and permanently on file. It is crueller than anything English will say to your face. It is also, I think, closer to how we actually judge one another. I have been called it. I was fifteen, it was my cousin, and I have spent seventeen years not being sure she was wrong.
ɔburoni (also oborɔnyi, plural aborɔfo). Twi. It gets translated as white person and it does not mean that. It covers anyone lighter-skinned or straighter-haired than a dark-skinned Ghanaian, which in Osu in 2001 meant me, a Lebanese eight year old with a bowl cut. The etymology is argued over: one account takes it from a root for coming from beyond the horizon, another from a compound meaning wicked person, and the honest answer is that I do not know. What I know is the sorting. English race words sort you on a nineteenth century schema and drag the whole century along behind them. This one sorts on a different axis, from over there, which is why it also gets applied to Ghanaians who have lived in London. Secondhand clothing in Ghana is obroni wawu: dead white man's.
meda wo ase. Twi, thank you, contracted in speech to medaase. It is four words, me, da, wo, ase, and the last of them is still legible as the postposition for under. The gloss you will hear is that it means I lie down beneath you. That is plausible and I have not found it in a dictionary, so I am telling you it is a gloss and not a fact. What I like is that English did the same thing and finished the job: "thank you" is a verb phrase worn so smooth that nobody hears any thinking in it.
ɔdɔ. Love. That is the entire entry. It will never be in a book of untranslatable words and you can see exactly why.
My Twi list is short and the reason is not mysterious. I had Twi from the street in Accra between four and eleven, then I left, and street Twi does not follow you. The Arabic list is longer because Arabic was the house.
The only real finding here is in the shape of the list. Five of the nine are things you say to somebody standing in front of you, and a sixth is what you call them once they have gone. Greetings, blessings, verdicts on character. Almost none are nouns for private feelings. The genre wants nouns for private feelings, partly because a noun fits on a card, and partly because a noun implies that the speakers of that language walk around with emotional equipment you were never issued.
They do not. They have a phrase for the moment you come out of the bathroom. I would like it back, which is a much smaller and much more embarrassing thing to want.2
The proverb is usually given as Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi, translated as: it is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten. What people repeat on the tote bag is not a translation of the word. It is a loose translation of the proverb with the not wrong taken out, and the not wrong is where the whole force of it sits. ↩
There is a category for this in the attrition literature, which cheered me up more than it should have. Monika Schmid, following a taxonomy from Aneta Pavlenko, distinguishes borrowing, restructuring, convergence and shift, and notes that shift tends to hit parts of the repertoire that are highly culture-specific, politeness systems among them. Most of my list is a politeness system. ↩