Source — Wire, "20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words From Around the World"

Title: 20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words From Around the World
Author: Jason Wire
Publication: Matador Network
Date: 2010-10-05
URL: https://matadornetwork.com/abroad/20-awesomely-untranslatable-words-from-around-the-world/
Type: primary (the artifact itself — an early instance of the popular "untranslatable words" web listicle) / promotional-curious in stance, not skeptical
Accessed: 2026-08-29

Extract

Opens with the genre's characteristic framing, quoted exactly: "HERE ARE A FEW instances where other languages have found the right word and English simply falls speechless."
Presents 20 words framed as lacking English equivalents, spanning categories the project has already flagged as typical of the genre (emotional states, social behaviors) rather than concrete nouns — consistent with Chi Luu's later (2016) observation about the genre's selection bias (see jstor-daily-luu-2016-hygge.md).
Received enough traffic/interest that Matador Network followed up with a sequel, "20 More Awesomely Untranslatable Words From Around the World" (not yet ingested) — evidence the piece worked as viral web content, not just as a one-off.
Became a target of contemporaneous linguistic criticism: Geoffrey Pullum singled this specific article out on Language Log three weeks later (see languagelog-pullum-2010-translating-the-untranslatable.md), which is independent evidence the piece had real visibility, not merely archival interest.

This project has not established whether this is the first English-language web listicle of this type, only that it is an early, well-attested, and independently corroborated (via Pullum's contemporaneous pushback) instance — five to six years before the 2016 hygge wave. Earlier or contemporaneous instances (2007-2010) may exist and are unresearched.
The article does not cite its own sources for the 20 words (no dictionaries, informants, or prior compendia named), which is itself evidence for the genre's characteristic lack of sourcing discipline — worth noting as a contrast with this project's own provenance rules, not yet stated on a wiki page.

The "five of this project's fifteen word case studies" count above was made at the ya'aburnee session (when the project had fifteen words) and never updated. At close-out, an independent review of the project's essay re-fetched this article directly and re-read its numbered list against all twenty-five word case studies; the close-out session confirmed the result by its own direct fetch (2026-09-08). Nine of the project's twenty-five words appear on the list: 1 Toska, 2 Mamihlapinatapei (the article's spelling), 4 Iktsuarpok, 5 Litost, 12 Wabi-Sabi, 14 Schadenfreude, 16 Hyggelig, 18 Ya'aburnee, 20 Saudade. The Toska, Mamihlapinatapai, Iktsuarpok, and Hygge pages do not cite this source; per the source-record convention, this note records the corrected count without editing the original extract or those pages.

The untranslatable-words phenomenon
Ya'aburnee — this project's direct fetch of the article confirmed ya'aburnee (Arabic) is entry #18 of the 20, defined there as "'You bury me,' hoping to die before someone you love" — this project's first case of a new word case study already present, by name, in its own foundational listicle source, alongside four other words already on file from the same list (litost, wabi-sabi, schadenfreude, saudade) — five of this project's fifteen word case studies now traced to this single 2010 article.