My favourite things about lists of "untranslatable words" is that they always follow the word up with a translation
What they SHOULD be called is "Words with no direct equivalent" but that's not as snappy
@witchfynder_finder my two favourite things about lists of untranslatable words is that (a) some of the words don’t NEED to be translated, because we’ve just adopted them directly instead, and (b) they never include words from English, despite us having some great candidates, like “spooky” or “angst”
@witchfynder_finder see i just find that sad though because the best way to love the english language is to appreciate its unique aspects
and these lists are just like “here is why every other language is more unique and special than yours”
@Lady People love to shit on English all day and night and I am NOT here for it!! English is wonderful and expressive and we need to learn to love it for what it is!
@witchfynder_finder it’s part of the white project of making english fade into the background imo; if you point out english’s notable aspects then you’re situating it historically within a culture instead of just accepting it as an unspoken norm
it’s not as overt as the people who said that it was fine that latin was a dead language because it had already attained perfection, but it’s the same sort of thing i think; exotification of the other for the purpose of normalizing the same
@Lady Not to mention the impact that the "Latin is perfect" school has had ON conceptions of English and the hilariously-false "rules" people try to impose on it to make it more like Latin
@witchfynder_finder oh yeah i think it’s really interesting because we’re in this shift, where like a few hundred years ago they were all like “English is Broken it needs these Rules to Change” and now they’re all like “English is Perfect The Way It Is and these Kids just don’t know how to Speak Properly”
which has corresponded with the shift of it from being a put‐upon more lower‐class language to it being a prestige one
@Lady There is still a bit of that undercurrent of "English is broken and needs to be fixed" but anymore it shows up more as that one bad joke about English attacking languages in back alleys and stealing loose participles
Which joke, of course, entirely avoids asking WHY English might have so many influences from various world languages
@witchfynder_finder yeah it’s common to either get “English is just a hodgepodge of different languages and that’s why it’s bad!” (which is a bad take because it invokes a concept of linguistic purity) or “English is the Most Multicultural language and that’s why everyone should speak it!” (which is a bad take because it reinforces and upholds colonialism) and it’s very rare to get someone actually saying, “hey let’s look at the different factors which have lead to this influx of japanese terms in english fan and online communities” or w/e, which is where all the actually interesting stuff is at
@Lady Honestly it's a prime example of "Everyone asks me what linguistics is but also everyone thinks they are a linguist."
@witchfynder_finder literally you go pull up a grammar book from the right time period and they will have Several Pages dedicated to how each language has its own Journey to the Perfection which is Latin, and how English is only partway along that journey and it will be some time before it ever achieves that Greatness
now it’s all like ‘how dare you introduce habitual “be” ’
@witchfynder_finder the very last thing any proper white english person wants to do is think critically about actual english culture
tell us more about the funny words in german, please
@Lady That's because they're always written for English-speaking audiences who think they "love language" because they know the words "wanderlust" and "petrichor."