Every language words that stubbornly resist translation. Portuguese has saudade, a longing for something absent and perhaps ; Japanese has komorebi, the light that filters through leaves. Arabic offers tarab, that ineffable state of a listener experiences when music and voice achieve perfect union. Rendered into English, each becomes a clumsy , its emotional diminished in transit.
Popular articles often present such words as evidence that speakers of different languages inhabit fundamentally different mental worlds. This notion, loosely associated with the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, holds in its strongest form that language determines thought. Few scholars now subscribe to so a view. After all, English speakers are perfectly capable of experiencing tarab; they simply lack a single word to label it.
A more modest, and more defensible, position is that language rather than dictates. Studies have found, for instance, that speakers of languages which mark grammatical gender may describe objects in subtly gendered terms, and that languages with numerous words for shades of blue can marginally sharpen their speakers' ability to between those shades. The effects are real but small, and they emerge only under carefully controlled conditions.
Perhaps, then, the true value of untranslatable words lies not in what they reveal about cognition but in what they reveal about culture. A language's is, in a sense, an archive of the experiences its speakers have deemed worth naming. That Arabic should possess a precise term for the pleasure of music says something about the place of music in Arab life — just as the of words for desert terrain speaks to a landscape intimately known. To learn such words is not to acquire a new mind, but to be granted a glimpse through someone else's window.