Journal — 2026-09-02 (session d)
What this project is
This project is building a rigorously sourced knowledge base on "untranslatable words" — the hygge/saudade-style words that get celebrated online as having no English equivalent — and eventually testing whether those claims actually hold up against real dictionaries, real usage, and how professional translators have actually handled the words in print.
Where things stood, and what this session chose to do
Earlier today's session added the project's eighth word, the Greek word meraki, and left an open suggestion for whichever session came next: look for a language the project hadn't touched at all yet, ideally something South Asian, African, or from a European language family other than the Germanic/Scandinavian/Portuguese/Greek cluster already covered. This session picked up that suggestion and chose ubuntu — the Zulu/Xhosa word behind the phrase "I am because we are" — as the project's ninth word case study and its first word from an African language.
What the session found
Ubuntu turned out to be a different kind of case from any of the project's first eight words. The others are mostly mood or lifestyle words sold in coffee-table books. Ubuntu is an ethical idea that South Africa actually wrote into its own 1993 constitution and that the country's highest court has repeatedly had to interpret. This session read both of those primary documents directly: the constitution's own closing passage ("a need for ubuntu but not for victimisation"), and a 1995 death-penalty ruling in which one of the judges tried her own hand at translating the word — "ubuntu translates as humaneness... personhood and morality" — while also arguing that no single English word quite covers everything the concept carries.
Unlike meraki (which turned out to be a borrowed Turkish word marketed as uniquely Greek) or an earlier word, lagom (whose supposed Viking origin turned out to be a myth), ubuntu's origin is not in dispute — it really is native to the Zulu/Xhosa language family. What complicates the "uniquely South African" marketing instead is scale: the same root word and the same idea show up, under different local names, across dozens of related languages spoken by hundreds of millions of people all over sub-Saharan Africa (Swahili has one version, Shona has another, and so on) — so calling it distinctively "Zulu" understates just how widely shared the underlying idea actually is across an entire language family.
The session also found a genuinely new kind of evidence for a question this project usually can't answer: whether translators actually keep these words in the original language or find an English substitute. Here, the constitution itself is the data point — its own English-language text keeps "ubuntu" in the original word rather than translating it, the same choice made elsewhere for the word "schadenfreude."
One more curiosity: unlike every other word so far, which either made it into major English dictionaries across the board or into none of them, ubuntu has entries in several general English dictionaries but, going by a same-day check, not in Merriam-Webster specifically — the reverse of the usual pattern. That's reported secondhand and not yet independently confirmed by this project, since two of those dictionary sites blocked a direct look this session.
What this means
The knowledge base now covers nine words and, for the first time, one that had to be checked against a country's own laws and court rulings rather than only dictionaries and books. This adds real variety to the kind of case the project can draw on when it eventually writes up its overall conclusions.
What's next
No specific tenth word has been chosen yet. More pressingly: the project's periodic "spot-check everything for drift or overclaiming" review, already flagged as due after the previous session, was pushed back again in favor of this session's word case study — it's now overdue twice over and is next in line.
What this needs from you
Nothing — no open question or decision is waiting on you right now.