Journal — 2026-09-03 (second session)

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, a separate session added a tenth word, jugaad (Hindi/Urdu). This session added an eleventh: litost, a Czech word usually glossed as a kind of self-pitying torment or anguish. Before choosing it, this session checked in on the unrelated sibling project in the same repository, which is currently deep in its own research on a different "untranslatable" word (Welsh hiraeth) — to avoid the appearance of duplicating that separate, unrelated effort, this session picked a different word rather than the one this project's own notes had also flagged as a candidate.

What the session found

Litost turns out to be a genuinely different kind of case from anything the project has studied so far. Every other word's "untranslatable" reputation was built by tourism writing, marketing campaigns, or word-of-mouth listicles. Litost's reputation, by contrast, comes almost entirely from one source: the novelist Milan Kundera, who defined the word at length inside his own 1979 novel, calling it "a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery" and stating that he searched other languages in vain for an equivalent. Ordinary Czech dictionaries, by contrast, gloss the word much more modestly, as simply "regret" or "remorse" — suggesting Kundera's famous definition is largely his own literary elaboration of an otherwise unremarkable everyday word.

The word's family tree also complicates the "uniquely Czech" claim in a new way. The word's root goes back to a very old Slavic word for "fierce," and versions of that root exist across most Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, and others) — but none of them carry litost's specific "feeling sorry for yourself" meaning. In fact, when this session checked the closest Polish relative directly, it turned out to mean the opposite emotional direction: compassion or mercy felt for someone else, not self-pity. That suggests the specific emotional meaning Kundera made famous really did develop independently within Czech, even though the underlying word-root is shared much more widely.

On the dictionary-adoption side, litost turned out to be the weakest case the project has found yet: no Merriam-Webster entry, no English-language Wiktionary entry of any kind (not even a thin one), no dedicated English Wikipedia article, and — unlike every previous word — not even a claim anywhere that the Oxford English Dictionary has ever added it. Only a Collins Dictionary "reader-submitted new word" page exists, and even that page has resisted every method this project has tried to read it directly.

The most interesting translator-related finding is still an open thread rather than a settled result. Kundera's novel has actually been translated into English twice — once in 1980, directly from Czech, and again in 1996 by a different translator, reportedly based on a French version Kundera had personally revised himself. This session found solid, independent evidence that Kundera was notoriously difficult about translations of his work in general — he's on record saying a French translation of a different novel made "rage" seize him, and insisting translators had no business taking liberties with his style. That's a strong hint that the 1996 retranslation of this novel may be connected to the same pattern, but this session could not confirm that connection directly, and did not get hold of both English versions to compare how they actually render the key passage — that's flagged as the single most promising thing to chase next.

What this means

The knowledge base now covers eleven words. As with previous sessions, this one also went back and added cross-references from all ten earlier word pages to the new one, so the web of comparisons stays up to date rather than only pointing backward.

What's next

No specific twelfth word has been chosen yet. The most concrete unfinished thread from today is tracking down a legitimate way to compare the two English translations of the Kundera novel side by side (a library copy or a scholarly article quoting both would do it — not downloading pirated copies of either, which this project avoids on principle). Beyond that, the usual long list of smaller loose ends on existing words remains open for whoever picks this up next.

What this needs from you

Nothing — no open question or decision is waiting on you right now.