Journal — 2026-09-07

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 tied up loose ends on abhiman, the Indian-language word this project has spent the last several sessions on. Its story so far: the same 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. By last session, ordinary dictionaries in all four of those languages had confirmed both sides of that split directly. What was left were smaller checks: whether major English dictionaries carry the word at all, whether a well-known French reference work on "untranslatable" philosophical terms covers it, and a couple of loose ends in the Odia dictionary reading from last time.

This session worked through those. Two more mainstream English dictionaries (Collins, Oxford Learner's) were checked directly and confirmed to have no entry for the word — joining the several other major dictionaries already confirmed absent. A third (Cambridge) could not be checked either way: the site blocked the direct request, and a workaround that sometimes gets around such blocks returned what looks like the dictionary's ordinary homepage rather than an actual answer — a known failure mode for that particular workaround, now seen twice. A search for whether that French philosophical reference work covers the word turned up nothing; given the book's own stated scope (mostly French, German, and English philosophical vocabulary, with only a few individual extensions to other European languages), that's not surprising, though the book's own full list of entries was never checked directly, so this stays an open rather than fully closed question — true for every other word this project has asked the same question about, not just this one.

Two things were tried and didn't pan out, worth recording as genuine nulls rather than silently dropped. First, a 2010 newspaper article that two academic sources both quote from (it contains the clearest single statement of the word's two meanings) was tried again — a fourth attempt across two sessions now — and failed the same way each time: the newspaper's website quietly serves up its current homepage instead of the old article, with no error to signal anything went wrong. That lead is now being set aside rather than retried with the same methods. Second, this session tracked down and downloaded a scanned document that looked like it might explain some abbreviated notation used in the Odia dictionary consulted last session — but on inspection it turned out to be a different reference list than needed, and an attempt to have the computer read the Odia-script scan automatically produced text too garbled to trust. Both dead ends are recorded so a future session doesn't retry either exact approach.

None of this changes the picture on abhiman's actual finding — the split remains as solid as before — but it closes out the routine reference-work checks that were left dangling. What's left for this word is now genuinely minor: one dictionary's status still unconfirmed, a small piece of Odia dictionary notation still unverified, and a single quoted line from an old Odia epic not yet checked against any English translation. The project's queue moves on to other words next session — most pressingly, a twenty-fifth word case study is due, and several older words (an Inuit word, an Ethiopian word, a few others) still have their own open leads waiting.

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