Appendix B. Glossary

Terms are explained as they are used in this essay and the knowledge base; where a term has broader uses in linguistics, the entry notes the sense intended here.

• Akam — the “interior” (love-poetry) genre of classical Tamil literature, whose conventions assign five phases of love to five landscapes; Tamil oodal names one of the five.
• Baton — the project’s NEXT.md file: the working state handed from one session to the next, rewritten from scratch every session.
• Calque (loan translation) — a word or phrase translated piece by piece from another language rather than borrowed as sound: English “lose face” from Chinese. Contrast loanword.
• Case shape (“shape of complication”) — the project’s informal label for a distinct way in which a popular untranslatability claim turned out to be complicated by the evidence (a loanword origin, a shared root, a contested meaning at home, and so on). The project counted nineteen; this essay does not rely on the count.
• Cognate — a word in one language that shares an ancestor with a word in another: Polish litość and Czech lítost are cognates whose meanings have diverged.
• Connotation and denotation — a word’s associations, register, and emotional coloring (connotation) as against the thing or idea it refers to (denotation). Paraphrase preserves denotation and tends to lose connotation.
• Contronym — a word with two opposed senses; Hindi jugaad is used both for admirable ingenuity and as a euphemism for corruption.
• Controlled digital lending — a library practice under which a scanned in-copyright book can be “borrowed” by one reader at a time; the Internet Archive’s version blocked the project from reading even the text files of several scanned books.
• Cultural keyword — in the research tradition associated with Anna Wierzbicka, a word (like gezellig) that is unusually revealing of a culture’s values and is analyzed by paraphrase into a small fixed set of simple concepts (the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, NSM).
• Cultural turn — the shift in translation studies, usually dated to 1990, from asking whether a translation is equivalent to its source to asking what cultural, ideological, and institutional forces shaped it.
• Cute aggression (“dimorphous expression of positive emotion”) — the psychologists’ name for the urge to squeeze or pinch something overwhelmingly cute; the phenomenon Tagalog gigil and Indonesian gemas name.
• Domestication and foreignization — Lawrence Venuti’s terms for a translation that reads as if written in the target language (domesticating) versus one that keeps the reader aware of the source’s foreignness (foreignizing), for instance by keeping a foreign word.
• Dynamic and formal equivalence — Eugene Nida’s terms for aiming at the same effect on the reader (dynamic) versus staying close to the source’s wording and form (formal).
• Fence — in the project’s working notes, a recorded dead end: a method tried and failed, a site that blocks access, a lead ruled out — kept so that no later session repeats it without a new reason.
• Folk etymology — a popular but false story about a word’s origin: the Viking mead-horn tale told about Swedish lagom.
• Genre (“the popular phenomenon”) — in this essay, the body of listicles, gift books, and social-media posts presenting foreign words as lacking English equivalents.
• Language family and isolate — a family is a group of languages descended from a common ancestor (Indo-European, Austronesian, Niger-Congo); an isolate, like Yaghan, has no demonstrated relatives.
• Lexical gap — the absence in one language of a single word for a concept another language names in one word. The mechanism underneath nearly every untranslatability claim; not the same as the concept being inexpressible.
• Linguistic relativity (the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis) — the idea that language shapes thought; in its strong form, that language determines what can be thought (treated as refuted, at least for the color-vocabulary test case, by the source the project read); in its weak form, that language influences habitual attention.
• Lint pass — borrowed from programming: a periodic check of the wiki for problems a link checker cannot see, such as contradictions and stale claims.
• Loanword — a word borrowed from another language with its sound and usually its spelling; an unadapted borrowing keeps the original form exactly (Schadenfreude).
• OED — the Oxford English Dictionary, the historical dictionary of English; its website was largely unreadable to the project, so most OED facts here are “reported” at second hand.
• Polysemy — one word having several related senses; gezellig and toska are polysemous in ways that no single English word covers.
• Primary, secondary, tertiary source — the thing itself (a dictionary entry, a constitution, a translator’s own essay); a work about it (a review, a scholarly article); a summary of secondary works (an encyclopedia). The project labeled all but one of its sources.
• Proto- (Proto-Slavic, Proto-Bantu, Proto-Semitic) — a reconstructed ancestor language, with reconstructed forms marked by an asterisk.
• Reader proxy — a web service that fetches a page and returns its text; the project used one to get past some blocks, and learned that it sometimes silently returns the wrong page.
• Squash-merge — combining a session’s commits into one and adding it to the repository’s main branch; every session had to end this way.
• Synthesis (of a search tool) — the summary text a web-search or page-fetch tool generates about what it found, as distinct from the page itself. The project found such summaries can invent quotations and refused to file anything from them unverified.
• Translation shift — J. C. Catford’s term for a departure from formal correspondence between source and target (a noun rendered as a verb, a clause as a phrase) in the course of translating.
• Untranslatable (Cassin’s sense) — in Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables, a philosophical term that keeps being translated differently rather than one that cannot be translated; nearly the opposite of the popular sense.
• Wiktionary — the crowd-written multilingual dictionary; the project used its dated citations as evidence of English-side circulation and its etymologies as a starting point to be checked.