What's a word from another language that you wish was a thing in English?

I really hope OP has mentioned this as his favourite word to some German folk before.

I know some German and when he said it's literally "Sunday emptiness", but the word not having Sontag in it, I knew something was up.

On the topic of "words that don't exist", every time German is brought up (or any other language where you just mash words together to get a new one) I kinda roll my eyes. Sure, it's ot one word in English, but that's mainly because of the way the language works.

My mom's grandparents were from Germany (Came over just in time to fight in 2 World Wars and raise a large family through the Great Depression. Still I suppose it went better than if they'd stayed put) so she was exposed to a lot of German culture. She always insisted our cats' flemen response was called "mittelschmerzing". I only learned the truth when I got old enough to experience mittelschmerz for myself and looked it up.

I feel like I've used "sitpisser" pretty frequently actually.

We have something similar in Macedonian. "Na zdravye" which literally translates to "to health". We say it in the same context as you and in addition after a meal, after a sneeze and etc.

Here in Bulgaria we say "Честита прическа", which means "Congratulations on your haircut". When I went abroad and had the urge to congratulate one of my foreign friends I realised that's not universal and it got me thinking where else is it done - now I know thanks for sharing.

"You look hot!"

"Thanks bro, hope you get to look hot soon too!"

Speaking of Arabic, I wish I knew an equivalent to "inshallah". You can literally translate it as "Lord willing" in English but it's used wayyy more often and in more interesting ways, and I wish I knew an equivalent.

I was taught the 3 was a "growled aa" or "phlegm aaa" but there's so many regional dialects that I'm really only good at reading city names at this point.

I just burst out laughing when I read your comment, how charming! And true. I sure packed on the grief bacon when my husband died. Thank you for the laugh over something sad~

Kummerspeck

"grief bacon"

Brilliant. I am stealing this. Is there a word for weight put on for other reasons? Asking for several kilos of additional me.

This is a great one... I still want Stau to be a thing in English though. So much easier than complaining about "traffic jam".

I would propose "just so" as one of several options for translating it.

The words used absolutely needs to be tailored for the specific context in English, in order to convey the same meaning.

"Y'all" has found its way in some dictionaries.

Another omission in English: whichse, to query for inanimate possession.

There is "who" and you can ask "of whom is this" or "to whom does this belong", in short: whose. In my mind, the answer to a "who" is animate, whereas the answer to a "which" is not, so I can hardly ask "whose planets are these?" when the expected answer is something like "Tau Ceti's" (a star; an inanimate object) since animate objects (like humans) don't own planets (yet!).

As counterpart to "who", there is "which", but there is no possessiveness query counterpart for "whose" even if the construction of adding -se can be perfectly applied to "which". So I'm trying to get people used to that whenever appropriate :D

It is similar to "plural you" also in the way that y'all can be used, just like I can use whichse, but is not always understood. People see y'all as a dialect variant of a word rather than a word with a distinct meaning, and I have a South African colleague who uses it constantly in informal settings as a filler word for when there's half a second of "what to say next" silence, so using it is not exactly an unambiguous "plural you". Not to mention that, 99% of the time, the persons I speak with aren't native speakers and would rarely know this distinction.

(While we're on the topic of English omissions: writing words together like in germanic languages is less ambiguous than spaced compound nouns, and I'm missing the verbifying we do in Dutch a lot, like "what are you doing?" "computering!" where you'd have to say in English "I'm on the computer" or something.)

Thee and thou haven't gone anywhere and are still understood by English speakers, even if they often don't know which to use in a given situation. I'm convinced the reason we don't use them anymore is because we really don't like inflection.

The thou/thee dichotomy went away because we didn't need it. People can't even get is/are or a/an right consistently, so I don't think it's likely to come back.

In Scots we just say yous.

My default is to say "you guys" when attempting a plural 'you'. Still feels awkward to say at times especially in professional settings, but is reasonably accepted.

In a similar vein, it would be kind of neat if English had both an inclusive and exclusive "we" (i.e., first person plural pronoun).

Is that the same as this or is there more to the word?

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/natafelen (Dutch)

to stay at the table after eating in order to continue talking

It's also captured well by this MARO song, written after the loss of her grandfather. I like this cozy live performance better than the Eurovision one, but both are great.

There's a Welsh word that has a similar kind of meaning; hiraeth.

It's strange because once you learn about the definition of these types of words you can very much relate to them in your own way, so it's strange we never adopted something similar in english.

Came here to say saudade, and I'm leaving with paintings to go look at! Thank you!

Not "homesickness?"

The band Love and Rockets have a beautiful instrumental called 'Saudade' that evokes the feeling perfectly.

Would you say it's similar to the concept of "empty nest" in English, referring to the complex emotional state of parents whose children have grown up and moved away?

The same word exists in Swedish ("skadeglädje", same literal translation). The other German words mentioned in this thread have no equivalent that I know of, I just thought that was a bit interesting.

I’d say that this one is used commonly enough in English that it could properly be considered to have been integrated into the language.

This topic is fun but somewhat beside the point. In English, if we like some other language’s word we steal it.

I kinda prefer Freudenfreude, even if it's not a genuine German word.

And when I hear "joy joy", I can't help thinking of this.

There is an English word for it, epicaricacy

Reminds me of this video

That's a great one, thank you for sharing :)

The phonemes are imitated, but what actually comes out of their mouths is gibberish.

Huh, that sounds like a fun challenge actually, to have to guess what someone is saying in your language when they don't speak it even slightly and are just imitating lyrics or repeating after a priest or so (without you having heard what it is they're trying to repeat)

There's a Yiddish/English/Hebrew word, nudnik, which has similar connotations. I understand that in Japanese culture, to be a trouble or bother has very negative social repercussions, but a nudnik is also a pain in the neck or bore that you can't easily avoid because you have some degree of responsibility towards them - a relative, coworker/boss, customer, etc.

My personal favorite that I had to find an old Reddit post about, and apparently it's completely true:

賢者タイム (kenjataimu): the literal translation here would be "Wise man time". However, the Internet has a much better way to phrase it: fellas, when is the absolute BEST time for making any major decision?

That's right: it's basically the Japanese word for what's known online as "post-nut clarity."

I think the Tagalog/Taglish word for this is hassle, which is actually English.

If nothing else, I want it to become a word in other languages only so it stops being used as though it's a uniquely Danish way of life

I can see English absorbing it eventually the same way it absorbs every other useful word that gets used often enough. A hot mug of tea on a cold day with a cat in your lap, or a morning under the covers in bed cuddling with a loved one... yeah it's more than just "cozy".

I want to believe the dutch word 'gezellig' mimics this but I feel it doesn't really compare. Hopefully someone can elaborate on this.

You might have only remembered half of the phrase - nichevo podelat' (ничего поделать) . It literally means "nothing to do (about it)". The word nichevo by itself means "nothing". It's far too common to have those complicated meanings you quoted without being part of a phrase. Or maybe the woman you talked to was interpreting the word more poetically than most Russian speakers.

You might like "asennuskalja" as well then. It means a beer that you have while building, installing or fixing something.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I take it that you meant to write underwear (took me a while)

just because it’s lacking space(s), that does not make it a true “word"

It's as much a new word as washing machine is a new word. Both that and wasmachine are compound nouns, only the syntax differs

In most germanic languages (afaik), separate words have spaces but things that form one unit don't. In English, it's one big jumble of spaced components. Only compound adjectives may be hyphenated but even that is only sometimes ("logged-in user", vs. "user is logged in": hyphenation is only legal before the noun it modifies!) and falling out of style as well ("logged in user"-style is getting more common).

The germanic way has the advantage of being less ambiguous. Take long term substitute teacher

• could be a teacher about substitutions, if that were a subject (so you need to know what are contemporary subjects to understand the spaced-out phrase). If that's what you wanted to say, germanified this would be a longterm substituteteacher (real subjects, like English, are written together because it's a type of teacher and not an adjective to teacher: engelsdocent)
• could be a teacher who teaches how to substitute particularly long terms (for example, how to teach such a term). If that's what you wanted to say, germanified this would be a longtermsubstituteteacher (one noun)
• could be a teacher who replaces another teacher, who now has been away for a long time. Germanified: longterm substitute teacher (two adjectives, one noun)
• could be a teacher who replaces another teacher for this term, and they are long. Germanified: long termsubstituteteacher

_{Actually translated in the above order (partially to convince myself all of these are truly legal options): langdurige vervangdocent, langsemestervervangdocent, langdurig vervangende docent, lange semestervervangdocent. (We don't have the word "term" as an adjective with the meaning of "duration" that also has the meaning of "semester", so depending on the meaning I translated it as -durig (literally: -lasting) or semester.)}

Of course, this is rarely an issue in practice or it wouldn't be common practice to use spaces in the middle of adjectives ("long term") as well as nouns ("substitute teacher"), but every few months I run into a situation where I wish English worked in this way to remove ambiguity about what I mean

What I don't know is whether the English way has any advantage. Is it simpler to learn the language? Sure: fewer rules; but as I mentioned, it now requires implicit context (in the example: knowing what subjects exist) to comprehend the phrase. Maybe it's easier to read the separate units and do mental assembling if you're dyslexic? Or maybe writtentogether (if you're used to such a language, obviously) is easier if you're dyslexic? I don't know

One hilarious-to-me result of these differences in meaning from varying the spacing is finding the true meaning behind a mistaken space. A sign saying "elevator outsideuse" means the elevator is for outside (less literally: outdoor) use only. One might picture trying to take the elevator outside to go for a walk! Writing "elevator outside use" (less literally: out of use) means the elevator is out of order, presumably the intended meaning but this is not what the sign says! There are collections of such mistakes: Dutch: stichting onjuist spatiegebruik; German: deppenleerzeichen

Now that I'm a quadragenarian I can definitely use that excuse. I've never really had that excuse before and it's frustrating to have name blindness as you put it.

I'll have to remember that. Lol

Is the first one the same as 'shigata ga nai', or is there a difference?

I think you're underselling "doch" -- it's not only used to answer questions, it's also used as a very hard to learn to use correctly particle in certain sentences. You can sometimes translate it to "still" or "anyway" or "though" in English but it's generally hard to map out the meaning in English bc we don't really have a direct equivalent. Translations sometimes just leave it out when it's used this way. It adds some great flavor to sentences but boy is it tough to learn to use.

This is one of two non-loan words I use in English when talking with German speakers, though if I'm being honest, I could just find apt replacements depending on the situation, such as cozy or nice or fun

The other loan word, I sometimes find easier to explain and continue to use than to find an apt replacement for: doch. In Dutch, we'd use something like "wel", so we have a reasonable translation, but in English you're stuck with a longer reaffirming sentence that just doesn't punch as well. "You weren't gonna go shoplifting tonight right?" -> "Doch!" / "Wel!" / "Yes I am"

While on the topic of Dutch, try translating lekker. It means everything from tasty (lekkere friet, tasty fries) to pleasant (lekker slapen, pleasant sleeping) to sexy-looking (lekkere meid, sexy girl) to well (gaat lekker, goes well) to a general intensifier (lekker makkelijke plant, particularly easy plant, like, easy to take care of).
If it's positive and you're not sure what to say, try a lekker and odds are that it works!

Don't some northerners use yins or youse?

Everyone? Haha. But I see your point.

a nice way to interact with society around you, to wish them a good meal.

Is it something you say when walking by someone's table who is eating but you don't know them and you use this as a greeting? Or how should I imagine this?

The German mahlzeit! comes to mind, if I'm not mistaken they say that to a room full of eating people (or people walking to a canteen also, perhaps? Not sure) to greet them all at once while also acknowledging that it's food time

So many languages have some sort of word or sentence to say as a "now start eating" phrase. Blessings or well wishes seem most common.

There's a vernacular, "I feel ya", which seems to fit nicely.