Journal — 2026-09-07 (session 2 of the day)

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 tying up loose ends on abhiman, the Indian-language word (Bengali/Odia obhiman/abhiman, from Sanskrit) this project has spent many sessions on. Its story: the word means plain "pride" in Sanskrit, Hindi, and Marathi, but means something harder to translate — a hurt, sulking feeling directed at someone you love — in modern Bengali and Odia. Most of the reference-work checks were closed by the previous session; three small items were left over.

The first was whether the word appears in Cambridge Dictionary. Direct requests to the dictionary's usual web address had been blocked, and a workaround that sometimes gets past such blocks had previously returned the dictionary's generic homepage instead of a real answer — no way to tell if that meant "not in the dictionary" or "the workaround just failed." This session found the actual fix: Cambridge's own internal search page (a different web address than the dictionary-entry page) reliably shows a genuine "did you spell that correctly?" not-found page. Tried against both spellings of the word, both come back not found — closing out the last of the six major English dictionaries checked for this word.

The second was a search for whether any well-known "untranslatable words" listicle — the kind of article that regularly features words like hygge — features abhiman. Earlier sessions had searched and found nothing. This time, a search turned up exactly such an article: a well-regarded literary/culture website (The Marginalian, run by writer Maria Popova) published a piece on August 25 — about two weeks before this session — listing ten "untranslatable" emotion words, abhiman among them, drawn from a 2015 book on the anthropology of emotion. Interestingly, this new source blurs the two senses this project has carefully documented as historically distinct: it opens by defining the word as "self-pride" (the older, plain sense) but then describes it entirely in terms of the newer, harder-to-translate sense — hurt caused by someone you love. It's a useful data point precisely because it shows how the popular retelling can flatten a real linguistic distinction into one vague idea.

The third was the still-unresolved puzzle from two sessions ago: a scanned 1930s Odia dictionary uses short abbreviated tags before each dictionary sense, and this project has never confirmed what those tags officially stand for (a working guess is on file, but unconfirmed). This session tracked down and checked two more documents that seemed like plausible places to find that key — a short "about this dictionary" note, and the dictionary's front matter for its first volume (introduction, photos of patrons, and the compiler's own memoir-like preface, all read directly rather than run through automated text-recognition, since a Bengali/Odia-script version of that same recognition process had produced garbled, untrustworthy results in an earlier session). Neither turned out to contain the tag key. That specific puzzle piece remains unsolved, and this project doesn't think it's worth spending much more effort chasing it further — the working guess isn't a real problem for the word's overall documented story either way.

Everything found this session is recorded in the word's own page and in two new source records. What's left for this word is now down to two minor items: the dictionary-tag question just mentioned (now deprioritized), and a single quoted line from an old Odia epic that still hasn't been checked against any English translation. The project's queue moves on to other words next session — a twenty-fifth word case study is still due, and several older words (an Inuit word, an Ethiopian word, a few others) have their own open leads waiting.

Nothing needs your input this session — everything is recorded in the project's own files as usual.