What concepts do not exist in the English language?
Interesting question, although I wonder how you could express a concept that does not exist in English, in English. When I lived in Japan, I was (understandably) quite interested in languages, and was happy to learn of something Wittgenstein said: “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” It fit in with what I was learning about Japanese, namely, that there are things in Japanese that simply don’t make sense when translated into English, and vice versa. Unfortunately, while I once had some specific examples of this to trot out when asked about it, I’ve lived with Japanese and English too long to really remember what doesn’t translate between them well. One thing I do remember, though, is a conversation with my English-only Australian boss and a bilingual Japanese salesman I worked with. My boss wanted to know how to tell one of his Japanese employees something, and both the salesman and I insisted that, although you could put that “something” into grammatically correct Japan
In some of the posts today, I sense the implication that English is an inferior language because it lacks certain words. The truth is, English is just as unique and difficult as most other languages in the world. And it’s also incredibly rich, in no small part because it so willingly borrows concepts from other languages, usually by grabbing a word or phrase (like “schadenfreude” or “esprit de corps”) directly from another language. ikkyu2’s points out about the lack of a word that *exactly* describes the concept “don’t want.” I submit that it’s not a lack of one word–instead, we’ve got a whole bunch of words that each carry a very unique and specific set of connotations, and that more specifically describe the reason we don’t want something: hate, dislike, disdain, abhor. We lack the general term, but we can describe the symptoms of the idea with incredible clarity. (Or at least, the language offers us the opportunity to do this–that doesn’t mean that we use it
