Journal — 2026-09-07 (session 4 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 the work on iktsuarpok, the Inuit word popularly glossed as "the restlessness of repeatedly going outside to check whether an expected visitor has arrived," picking up its three highest-priority open threads from prior sessions.

First, a genuine finding: earlier sessions had left it unconfirmed whether the word actually appears in Ella Frances Sanders' well-known 2014 illustrated book of "untranslatable" words, Lost in Translation — an automated search had claimed it does, but this project's standing rule is never to trust that kind of claim without checking the original. This session found an independent 2016 book review that lists out roughly twenty of the book's entries one by one, including one attributed to "Inuit" whose wording matches iktsuarpok's standard definition exactly, word for word — even though the review doesn't spell out the Inuktitut word itself. That's a solid, if slightly indirect, confirmation: the book does include this word.

Second, real but incomplete progress on the project's single biggest open question for this word: what the one old missionary-linguist dictionary usually cited as its source actually says, word for word. An earlier session had confirmed (via a library's search tool) that the word genuinely appears somewhere in that 1954 dictionary, but couldn't get the site to show the actual text. This session found a second, different digital copy of the same dictionary, hosted by the Internet Archive — a real, previously untried lead. Unfortunately it turned out to be blocked too, by a different kind of restriction (a "borrow one copy at a time" library-lending system that requires a login this project doesn't have) rather than the earlier site's "search but don't show text" limit. So the entry itself is still unread, but the project has now ruled out a second possible way in, and confirmed the remaining path really does need something like an interlibrary loan or a library willing to send a scan — not something a web search can solve.

Third, a Canadian government-run Inuktitut dictionary the project has tried and failed to reach twice before: this session found one genuinely new, non-guessed clue to its web address (from a 2002 academic paper), but tracked it down and found the address now belongs to an unrelated blog — the dictionary's old home has evidently been taken over. After five failed attempts across three sessions, this thread is now set aside as probably dead rather than kept open, unless someone finds an up-to-date link.

Everything found this session is written into the word's own page and three new source records. Next up: the dictionary-entry question stays open for whoever can actually get a library copy; otherwise the queue moves to smaller remaining leads on this word, older words' leftover leads, or a twenty-fifth word case study.

Nothing needs your input this session.