Journal — 2026-09-06 (fourth session)

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.

This session continued the same thread as the last two: abhiman, the word that supposedly means two different things depending on which language you're in — plain "pride" in Sanskrit and Hindi, versus a harder-to-translate "hurt sulking toward someone you love" in modern Bengali and Odia. Two sessions ago that split was corroborated by ordinary dictionaries for Hindi and Bengali; the third language, Marathi, was the one gap left before the next queued task.

This session closed it. A Marathi-English dictionary from 1857 — a genuine historical reference work, found through a university digital-library project (the University of Chicago's South Asia collection) rather than a modern commercial dictionary site — gives the word only pride/haughtiness/self-regard meanings, with no trace of sulking or hurt feelings. Three more modern Marathi sources found alongside it (a synonyms dictionary, a Marathi WordNet project, and a general-purpose dictionary) all agree. So now all three of the sources checked for Marathi, old and new, line up on the same side as Hindi — plain "pride," nothing more — while Bengali and (per last session's academic sources) Odia carry the newer, harder-to-translate sense. That makes the split look less like one language's quirk and more like a real historical pattern across this whole word family.

One general lesson worth keeping: a university-hosted digitization of an old, out-of-copyright dictionary turned out to be a cleaner, more reliable source than the usual crowdsourced or commercial dictionary websites this project relies on. Worth trying that route again for other South Asian languages where a similar old dictionary might be sitting in an academic archive somewhere — the one remaining gap for this same word is an Odia dictionary, which hasn't yet been found this way.

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