Asking non-native English speakers.
झूठा खाना/पानी (Jhootha khana/pani)
Food/water that is cosumed by someone else and hence is unsuitable for eating/drinking. Especially for religious or devotional rituals.
In the similar vein, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prasada
Food/water that is cosumed by someone else and hence is unsuitable for eating/drinking
“Half-eaten food”.
Żal
In Polish it means a feeling of sadness, regret, being unable to accept the reality. It’s often compared to grief, but it’s not confined to losing someone. When you look at the past, regretting your life choices, you feel żal.sorrow
Way too many for Chinese (think every Chinese dish you know), but the one world I think about the most in this context these days is 老百姓 (lao3 bai3 xing4) (Also see a somewhat related Wikipedia article). Direct translation is “ol’ hundred surnames”
It’s… a non-formal word for the “commoners” or the “average person”. This is a concept I don’t hear in mainstream media that much nowadays. I don’t think most news or mainstream media even refers to say the entirety of the lower to middle social class in one word… (Note that it is different from “Average Joe”, which does have a Chinese counterpart which translates to “Zhang three Li four”)
On top of it, the whole concept of “a hundred surnames” representing most of society is kind of absurd in English-speaking countries. Societies with historical Chinese influences tend to have lots of ppl share the same surnames
Does it count if English just steals your words?
Schadenfreude, Zeitgeist, Weltanschauung, Kindergarten.
The problem is when they steal a word and then change the meaning.
You don’t want to go down that road.
“beamer, handy, mobbing, shooting…”English words, yes? What about them?
I guess you don’t speak German, as those are now German words that you might not be able to guess their meanings
Looking forward to “woonerf.”
Zeitgeist works well as “spirit of the times”; Weltanschauung as “worldview”; and Kindergarten as “pre-school”.
That’s what English does. Why do you think OP is asking?
It’s what every language does, to some extent. You’d really struggle to say, “I was working from home, sending emails and providing feedback, and during a meeting with my team and the marketing manager, the internet died” in German without stuffing the sentence to the brim with English loanwords.
The french: Je ne suis pas d’accord
Je travaillais depuis chez moi, j’envoyais des courriel et je faisais des retours, et au cours d’une réunion avec mon équipe et le directeur commercial, la connexion Internet a lâché.
Angst, although that one became more of a false friend: Fear of the unknown vs Teenage BS
Doppelganger, wanderlust, poltergeist…
Stein… oh wait no, spiel… oops not quite
Blitzkrieg?
Blitzkrieg translates pretty well doesn’t it? Fast war?
Lightning being the literal translation but used in the same way as fast.
I always assumed lightning war was just a way of making it sound more interesting, I didn’t realise blitz just meant lightning
Perhaps if the meaning is different or altered from the actual word.
I recently came across a word that I couldn’t find a translation for. In Swedish, the word “skallgång” refers to the act of walking in a line formation in a search party.
Bukkake.
It’s just the noun-form of the verb “kakeru”, in this context, to pour or splash a liquid, with the intensifier “bu” in front of it to suggest it’s done forcefully. Like in bukkake udon, where the broth is splashed onto the udon noodles.
It also has a certain other, rather more precisely defined, meaning.
Shaka, when the walls fell
Timba, his arms wide
Sokath, his eyes uncovered!
Darmok and Jalaad, at the bar.
Jalaad in the bathroom the next morning.
It always felt weird to me that English has no distinct phrase to express non-romantic affection.
English speakers use “I love you”, but in Italian (and many other languages) you’d make a distinction between a romantic partner and a friend/relative/whatever.
Ti amo = I love you, said for example to your partner, signifies a deep emotional bond, not something you usually say lightly.
Ti voglio bene = I love you, but less charges, more in a “I feel good about you” way
I always appreciated Spanish’s Te quiero vs te amo to express to friends my feelings for them, much better than “I love you, no homo”.
Hinh in Burmese. The closest equivalent is curry, and while all curries are hinh, not every hinh is curry. It basically means something you eat with the rice.
I know this was asking for non-English to English but I keep seeing the title as I scroll and thinking that English has a few words that don’t translate even to itself because they have no actual meaning/definition. Words like “the,” and “a.” They’re more like grammatical tools than real “words.”
the - definite article. a - indefinite article.
See German for some more fun articles.
Dreich - there is no direct English equivalent. It’s weather that’s wet and cold and dark and grey and unchanging. It can also mean depressing and tedious for obvious reasons.
Gloomy
Gloomy is not necessarily wet or cold.
I love it, but if I were to translate it to English, I’d say “miserable”. Works for weather (miserable weather is wet and cold and dark and bleh), and it covers the other use cases?
Dreary
Dreary is not necessarily wet or cold.
I would never call hot weather “dreary”
Maybe not, but dark, grey, overcast weather might well be dreary. But it wouldn’t be dreich.
“Kombinować” very Polish word for a very Polish a activity/philosophy. To make things work / get something done / take care of something in way that work for us, but are not the expected way to do things (though, ‘kombinowanie’ is often actually expected). It might be doing a job using the tools that are available and not thise that should be used, it might be a genuine invention, It might be using your contacts for favour (like getting a doctor appointment), it might be plain cheating.
A little bit like ‘hacking’ and also can be a good thing or a bad thing.
“Wykombinuję coś” = “don’t worry I will take care of that” “Co za kombinator” = “what a cheaty bastard”
close cousin to jury-rig
Dude, the word you’re looking for in English is to hustle.
Source: am Polish.
In Spanish that would be “picaresca” and Spanish people also think it’s something that doesn’t really exist in other cultures.
There’s also scheming, but i don’t think either one is a 1 to 1 equivalent.
Chez
It’s a preposition meaning “at the home/house/place” but can also be use figuratively. Really super cool.
My first room share ‘Chez Penez’ makes so much more sense now.
Hygge=gezelligheid
Doch
There exists no english equivalent for doch, it has multiple functions, the most known one being an expression that emphatically negates a previous sentiment.
“Does not!”
“Does too!!”Which created one of the most long lived german memes.
“It should not be that way, but it was.”
Came here for doch. Its one of my favourite words im using arguing with AFD voters and works every time its like a spell.
It fills a big gap in English because there is no single English word to unambiguously answer a question like:
“So you don’t want me to come over this afternoon?”
