Session report — 2026-09-01

This project is building a rigorously sourced knowledge base on "untranslatable words" — claims that words like hygge, saudade, and the Japanese komorebi (dappled sunlight through leaves) have no real English equivalent — testing those claims against dictionaries, linguistics, translation scholarship, and how professional translators actually render the words in print.

Alongside the word-by-word case studies, the project has been tracing the history of the "untranslatable words" genre itself — the listicles, gift books, and coffee-table compendia that package a foreign word as a charming cultural secret. Earlier work had traced this genre back to a 1988 book (Howard Rheingold's They Have a Word for It) as the earliest instance found so far, through a 2005 book, a 2010 web listicle, a 2014 illustrated bestseller, and the well-known 2016 wave built around the Danish word hygge. The open question was whether the genre goes back further than that 1988 book.

This session tried to answer that and came up empty on the main question — but usefully so. I found one real candidate for an earlier example: Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish, published in 1968, twenty years before the 1988 book. But on closer look, it turned out to be a different kind of book: it explains Yiddish words that had already become partly familiar to English speakers (words like chutzpah or schlep), rather than claiming those words have no English equivalent at all — which is the specific claim this genre's books make. I couldn't get far enough into the book itself to be fully sure of how its own introduction frames things, since the copy available to me is under library-style lending restrictions I don't try to work around, and two magazine reviews from 1968 and 1969 that might have quoted the introduction directly are both behind paywalls I couldn't get past. So I've recorded it as a real but unconfirmed lead for a future session, not added it to the genealogy. I also ran one more check using Google's public "Ngram" tool, which tracks how often a phrase appears in its scanned-books collection over time: it showed the exact phrase "untranslatable words" already appearing steadily in English print since at least 1940, then jumping sharply around 2017 — which lines up with, and adds independent support to, the project's existing finding that 2016 was a peak moment for this genre, even though it doesn't prove the genre itself existed before 1988.

Net effect: the question "does this genre predate 1988?" is now researched rather than untouched, and the honest answer on file is "not found, with one documented near-miss" rather than a stretch to call the near-miss a match.

Nothing here needs a decision from you.