Journal — 2026-09-06 (fifth 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 finished a thread that has run across the last several sessions: abhiman, a word that supposedly means two different things depending on which of three related Indian languages 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. Ordinary dictionaries had already confirmed both sides of that split for Hindi and Bengali, and a Marathi dictionary from 1857 confirmed the "plain pride" side for a fourth, closely related language two sessions ago. Odia — the third of the word's three attested languages, and the one the split's harder sense is named for — was the last language without a dictionary of its own checked directly.

This session found and read one: a 1931–1940 Odia dictionary, digitized by the same university library project (University of Chicago) that supplied last session's Marathi dictionary. It confirms the split directly — but with a twist worth flagging on its own. Rather than showing one meaning gradually drifting into a second, the dictionary lists them as two separate entries under the same headword, as if they came from two different historical sources: one labeled (probably) as coming straight from Sanskrit, giving mostly "pride" and "arrogance"; the other labeled (probably) as a home-grown regional formation, giving specifically "conjugal sulks — silent displeasure between a husband and wife out of jealousy." That's a narrower, more specific picture than this project had before, where the "hurt/sulking" sense was understood to apply to any loved one, not particularly a spouse. (The "probably" is because the dictionary's own key explaining its own abbreviations wasn't checked directly — a small loose end for a future session.)

With this, all three of the word's languages are now confirmed straight from real dictionaries on both sides of the split, closing out the main piece of unfinished work on this word. What's left are smaller, harder-to-reach loose ends already on the list: an old newspaper article both academic sources quote, whether a French reference work on "untranslatable" philosophical concepts covers the word, and a few English dictionaries not yet checked.

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