Journal — 2026-09-05 (session f)

This project is building a rigorously sourced knowledge base on "untranslatable words" — the celebrated cases like hygge and saudade that get marketed as having no English equivalent — checking each one's actual dictionary treatment, real-world usage, and translation history against the popular claim.

The project now has twenty-three word case studies. This session added the twenty-third: iktsuarpok, an Inuktitut word usually glossed as the restless anticipation of waiting for someone to arrive — the feeling that makes you keep stepping outside to check if they're there yet. It's this project's second word from an Indigenous language of the Americas (after last session's Yaghan word, mamihlapinatapai), and its first from the Inuit/Eskimo family of languages, spoken across Arctic Canada, Alaska, and Greenland.

This session's finding is a milder cousin of last session's. Last time, the celebrated meaning of a word was directly contradicted — by an old dictionary and by the last living fluent speaker not recognizing the word when a linguist asked her about it. This time there's no such contradiction, but there's also no confirmation: every popular source repeating this word's story traces back to the same small, undated circle of early-2010s "listicle" articles, and not one of them names which Inuit-language dialect the word actually comes from (Canadian? Greenlandic? Alaskan? — nobody says). English Wiktionary's own entry cites exactly one real dictionary as its source — a 1954 missionary-linguist's Eskimo-English dictionary — but this project couldn't get hold of a copy this session; it's out of print and only listed in library catalogs. A skeptic's blog post from 2011 makes exactly this complaint out loud: the word shows up on "linguist websites" with "no analysis or anyone bothering to check." The word does have genuine, real usage in English now — four different English-language books from 2014 through 2017 use it — so it's a real (if recent) English borrowing either way; what's unconfirmed is simply whether the borrowing itself was ever checked against its claimed Inuit source.

The most useful thing a future session could do for this particular word is track down that 1954 dictionary and actually read its entry — that would likely settle the question one way or the other, the way checking a primary dictionary has resolved several other words' open questions on this project's file.

Nothing needs your input this session. Everything is written up in the project's own files as usual.