Project close-out (2026-09-08)

Written by the close-out session, the day the owner switched off the scheduled routine. This page records where the project ended; it makes no new research claim.

What the project produced

• 25 word case studies under words/, from 24 languages (counting Zulu/Xhosa, Hindi/Urdu, Bengali/Odia, and Indonesian/Malay pairs once each): saudade, hygge, komorebi, wabi-sabi, schadenfreude, lagom, gezellig, meraki, ubuntu, jugaad, litost, hüzün, sisu, mianzi, ya'aburnee, gigil, toska, teranga, tizita, gemas, sankofa, mamihlapinatapai, iktsuarpok, abhiman, oodal. Each page is built on a common skeleton (meaning and etymology, dictionary adoption, translator practice, genre presence, cultural politics, Gaps, See also) — the two earliest pages predate the full pattern and several omit sections with nothing to report — and cites a source record for every factual claim.
• 5 concept pages and 1 topic page: lexical gaps, Cassin's dictionary, three translation-theory pages (Jakobson/Catford/Nida, the cultural turn, feminist and postcolonial extensions), and the popular phenomenon.
• 240 source records under sources/, each with exact quotations, access dates, a stance label, a Gaps section, and a "Used in" list.
• 61 session entries in log.md and 61 owner reports in journal/.
• Spend: US$0.00 (see BUDGET.md).

Where things stand

• Phase 2 of the mission ("original research… evidence-based examinations of individual celebrated untranslatability claims… and synthesis essays") was never formally declared by a session — the mission's trigger (the base "can support accurate survey-level answers across the main subareas") was never assessed. Its substance nonetheless exists: every word page is such an examination, and the synthesis is the plain-language essay published at close-out in the repository-root docs/ folder (with an HTML mirror of this entire directory beside it, so the essay's claims link to their evidence here).
• Open leads: preserved verbatim in NEXT.md (20 items) and on each word page's Gaps section. Standing method fences (blocked hosts, exhausted access routes, tool cautions) are likewise preserved in NEXT.md.
• Provenance gaps found by the essay's close-out review (recorded, not fixed): the topic page states that Sanders's 2014 book "sat on the New York Times bestseller list for four months" and that hygge was "named a word of the year" by Oxford and Collins (the hygge page says "shortlisting"), citing source records whose extracts contain neither claim; and the Cassin's-dictionary scope-check source (session 58) records the publisher naming saudade among the dictionary's own example entries, a fact never reconciled with the saudade page and the Cassin concept page, which still say not to assume saudade is included.
• Known housekeeping debt (recorded, not fixed): the general contradiction/staleness read-through of all 25 word pages prescribed by framework.md §6 never ran as a separate pass; NEXT.md exceeded its 60-line cap without a logged decision; the running count of "shapes of complication" (nineteen by the last word) grew by accretion and its numbering is not internally consistent across pages — treat it as an informal tally, not a taxonomy.

What the close-out session changed

• Reciprocal-link lint over all word pages: 12 missing back-links added (one dated bullet per affected page); four drifted "other N word case studies" phrasings normalized. No word-page content claim altered.
• One dated correction note appended to sources/matadornetwork-wire-2010-untranslatable-words.md: the essay's independent review re-fetched the 2010 listicle and found nine of the project's twenty-five words on it (toska, mamihlapinatapai, iktsuarpok, litost, wabi-sabi, schadenfreude, hygge as hyggelig, ya'aburnee, saudade), not the five the record had counted when the project had fifteen words. The affected word pages were not edited.
• This page; the close-out entries in log.md and journal/; NEXT.md rewritten to a closed state; a "Project status" line in index.md.

See also

• index.md — the catalog; log.md — the timeline; conventions.md — the schema.