This is a book about words and the influence they wield over our lives, particularly our well-being.* It is also a book about how certain dimensions and experiences of well-being can be hidden from us because we lack the words to identify and understand them. Finally it is a book about the possibility of discovering these “missing” words through engaging with other languages. For, oftentimes, another culture has identified and named the phenomenon in question. Others have a word for it, even if we don’t, which makes these words untranslatable, in common parlance.
Such words are not merely intellectual curiosities. The spirit here is not “How strange that x have a word for y,” as if we were idly perusing a catalog of foreign lands with no intention of visiting. Rather, the animating principle behind this book is that such words may be valuable to us personally—as academics seeking to better understand well-being, and as people trying to live the best lives we can.
Roughly speaking, aside from providing appreciative insights into the culture that created them, the potential value of untranslatable words with respect to our own lives is twofold: (a) they can help us understand and articulate experiences with which we may already be vaguely familiar but for which we lack a corresponding concept; and (b) they can lead us to seek out and cultivate new experiences, with the possibility of expanding and enriching our existential horizons. This chapter will elaborate upon these points, laying out the theoretical foundation for the book, and elucidating how untranslatable words can improve our understanding and experience of well-being. First though, to help readers appreciate the value of such words, I will outline my perspective on words generally.*
The premise of this book is that words provide a map that can help people navigate their existence. The map is not a new metaphor in this context. The image was previously the great insight of Alfred Korzybski, creator of general semantics, a school of thought aimed at understanding and improving language use. Korzybski likened reality to physical terrain and language to a map charting it. This was a generally precise relation. “A map is not the territory it represents,” he wrote, “but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”1 In other words, just because a person knows the word “love,” for example, that does not mean they know experientially what it is like to be in love, with all the depth of feeling that involves. Nevertheless, so long as language is not mistaken for the reality it signifies, it can offer a helpful guide.
If language functions like a map, with words constituting specific features of this map, this leads us to a foundational point: not all maps are the same, since languages differ in how they delineate the world. These differences are revealed most starkly by untranslatable words, the central focus of this book. Crucially, though, these divergences between linguistic maps are not necessarily an epistemological problem; they may be very useful. For, by comparing maps and seeing how other cultures have configured theirs, we may be able to further develop and refine our own. And as we do, our understanding and appreciation of the world may be enriched accordingly.
In this chapter, I introduce these ideas over three main sections, thereby elucidating the theoretical basis of this book and the lexicography it describes. The first section expands upon the idea that language functions like a map, suggesting that in so doing it facilitates a form of “experiential cartography.” The second section raises the possibility that we have much to gain from studying the maps (i.e., languages) of other cultures, particularly their untranslatable words. In the third section, I argue that such words can enrich our understanding and experience of well-being.
Experiential Cartography
The central metaphor in this book is cartography, the making of maps. To appreciate this metaphor, consider the phenomenon of real-world cartography. We find ourselves immersed in an environment of near incomprehensible scale and complexity. Setting aside the infinite scale of the cosmos, we inhabit a planet boasting a land mass of nearly 58 million square miles, an astonishingly large terrain which nevertheless comprises less than 30 percent of Earth’s surface.2 The most viable way to get any cognitive purchase on this vast physical milieu, to reach any form of genuine comprehension, is to map it.
Cartography has been a constant throughout human history. Drawings speculatively identified as charts of visible star constellations were etched onto cave walls at Lascaux in France as far back as 16,500 BCE.3 It is apparently a deep human impulse to capture the environment in graphic form, transposing the three-dimensional world into meaningful two-dimensional (flat) or three-dimensional (model) representations. This endeavor has enabled societies to prosper in numerous ways, from navigating to other lands, to accounting for and managing their own territories.4 Explorers would chart far-flung regions for compatriots back home and future travelers. And mapmakers of all sorts have taken advantage of one of the most powerful features of cartography: the principle of scalable granularity.5 This refers to the capacity of maps to take on comparable levels of complexity irrespective of the actual size of the terrain represented. Thus, a country might produce maps of its territory as a whole, yet it is possible to generate equally detailed maps of specific locales within. An architect, say, can configure an area no bigger than a single building.
Words perform a function comparable to that of maps, helping people represent their world. In saying that, I do not just mean the physical world, as charted by conventional maps. I also mean our internal, subjective world of thoughts and feelings. I shall refer to these two worlds collectively as our experiential world.
In representing the experiential world, languages do not merely share superficial similarity with geographical maps but also replicate many of the deep features that make them so powerful. These include the capacity to (a) signify a world comprising multiple dimensions, (b) create boundaries to delineate this world, (c) show how different parts of the world stand in relation to one another, (d) capture aspects of reality using scalable granularity, and (e) guide understanding of familiar and unfamiliar environments. I will briefly touch upon these points in turn, which I conceptualize as five principles underpinning maps and words alike.
The Dimensionality Principle
The first point of similarity between maps and words is their ability to signify a world comprising multiple dimensions, which I call the dimensionality principle. Conventional geographical maps can render the complex, three-dimensional topology of the physical world in a simplified but proportionally accurate two-dimensional representation. Maps also can encode dimensions beyond the standard three of physical space. For instance, maps produced by the Malaria Atlas Project, detailing the global burden of the disease, account for time parameters.6
Words possess a similar capacity, signifying the world around us by attaching labels to salient features of this world. This claim is not without its caveats and complexities: philosophy abounds with debates about the nature of reality and the extent to which it can be perceived and appraised. However, notwithstanding solipsistic forms of subjective idealism associated with scholars such as Edmund Husserl,7 most thinkers agree that: there is a world that exists independently of people; people can become aware of and understand this world to an extent; awareness and understanding are mediated by psychological and social processes; and language is prominent among these processes. As with maps, then, a key function of words is to help us conceptualize the physical world. This includes delineating the configuration of objects in space—via orienting words (e.g., top, north), and labels for objects (e.g., coast, mountain)—and specifying properties of the world (e.g., color, temperature).
Along with the external physical world, words also represent the internal phenomenological world of qualia. Like the external world, the internal possesses multiple dimensions. Consider an influential neuropsychological model in consciousness studies, the state-space paradigm developed by Juergen Fell.8 This model is situated within the broader neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) approach, a contemporary way of engaging with the perennial mind-body problem.9 The NCC approach is based on a premise of psychophysical isomorphism—that is, states of mind are accompanied by analogous neurophysical states. At this relatively early point in our understanding of the brain, knowledge is not sufficiently advanced to definitively ascertain directional causality—whether the brain “causes” the mind, or vice versa—or resolve the ontological mind-body problem—how NCCs are connected to conscious states. Rather, the NCC approach just aims to chart the neurophysiological correlates of mental states.
The state-space model is one way of conceptualizing this correlation. It invites us to view both subjectivity (“the mind”) and brain activity (“the body”) as state-spaces of n dimensions (i.e., comprising any number of dimensions). Thus, the n-dimensional state-space of the mind encompasses every possible quale: all thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations, perceptions, and any other phenomena that a human is capable of experiencing.10 A given experiential state will therefore occupy a “location” somewhere in this n-dimensional phenomenological state-space of the mind. The theory holds that this location will correlate with a comparable location in the n-dimensional physiological state-space of the brain.
Consider, for example, a subjective feeling of pleasure. According to the state-space model, this experience is constituted by the configuration of a person’s mental state-space along many dimensions, including valence (how enjoyable the feeling is), intensity (how strong), duration, frequency, significance (how meaningful), and so on. A given mental state-space configuration correlates with an analogous neurophysiological state-space configuration pertaining to neural processes, such as the activation of specific brain regions and the release of certain neurotransmitters. Should the configurations change in any way—say, a reduction in subjective intensity, accompanied by a concomitant attenuation of the analogous brain-state dimension—the feeling of pleasure would change, shifting perhaps from a state we might refer to as “joy” into a less aroused state identified as “contentment.”
As that last sentence indicates, words are capable of capturing and representing specific configurations of our n-dimensional experiential world (which, to reiterate, comprises both the internal state-space of our subjectivity, and the external state-space of the world around us). That is, words enable us to map this world, a process I refer to as experiential cartography. This process begins with drawing boundaries, as the next principle elucidates.
The Boundary Principle
I call the second point of commonality between maps and words the boundary principle: both delineate the world by imposing boundaries upon it. In the case of geographical maps, territory is made comprehensible by the imposition of borders, which, for example, circumscribe nation-states. The lines drawn are frequently arbitrary (though not always, e.g., in the case of coastlines), based on political agendas (and associated power dynamics), and exist due to flexible social conventions. Nevertheless, such lines are real in their effects. For example, they determine the territory to which a given people is granted claim. A similar process happens with words. One way in which language renders our experiential world comprehensible is by demarcating boundaries, carving up its complexity into cognitively digestible pieces. This involves the delineation of objects (via nouns and pronouns), processes (verbs), qualities (adjectives and adverbs), relationships (prepositions and conjunctions), and communicative acts (interjections).
To appreciate how this process of boundary imposition works with respect to the external world, imagine a person who finds herself in a new city, on an unknown street. Her senses are bombarded by thousands of unfamiliar stimuli. And yet, she is not completely bewildered. Based on past experience, her mind is able to parse the scene into comprehensible components. In this she is aided in no small part by language, which enables her to apply labels to what she encounters: man, woman, pavement, road, car, shop, restaurant, and so on.
We likewise segment our internal world. To return to the example of pleasure, we become accustomed to demarcating a particular configuration of valence, intensity, duration, and so on as “joy,” and a related but different configuration as “contentment.” To be more accurate, it is not so much that we identify a particular point within this n-dimensional space as joy or as contentment. Rather, we draw boundaries within a given dimension, creating a localized range. The several ranges thereby produce a region of state-space corresponding to one or another experience. Thus joy might encompass a range of values toward the excitable end of the intensity spectrum, whereas a more muted span of values might be designated as contentment. Of course, words can be defined in different ways by different people and, indeed, by the same person at different times. These regions therefore are not precisely demarcated. It is better to think of them as a hazy cloud of probabilities, arising from the overlapping definitions people ascribe to the word in question.
In considering this drawing of boundaries, one point is especially important—a point made with particular eloquence by that broad school of thought known as social constructionism.11 Linguistic boundaries, like territorial ones, are drawn in somewhat arbitrary fashion. They are subject to convention. This is easy to appreciate when the boundaries are fuzzy or occluded: the distinction between a restaurant and a café, say, is not obvious or pre-given. It is a boundary that different cultures and people draw in their own ways, or not at all. Similarly, when it comes to feelings, it may not be clear how joy differs from elation. The subjective state-spaces represented by these words are not self-evidently demarcated but rather are determined by convention.
One of the great insights of constructionism is that even categories that many people and cultures take for granted as “natural”—such as sexual distinctions separating people into men and women—are to an extent socially created.12 As with maps though, these constructed boundaries are still powerful, regulating lives in important ways. The challenges faced by people who do not align with binary sexual categories attest to this.13
What is important for our purposes is that, because language reflects processes of social construction, there are potentially many ways of carving up the experiential state-space using words. Moreover, we’ll find that different cultures do indeed carve it up in varying ways. The conceptual and experiential possibilities that these differences offer—specifically, experiences of well-being influenced by the varied construction of language across cultures—are at the heart of this book.
The Network Principle
We’ve seen that both words and maps are able to delineate and represent n-dimensional state-space (the dimensionality principle), doing so by demarcating boundaries within it (the boundary principle). This brings us to the third point of similarity between maps and words: the network principle.
This refers to the notion that both maps and words are configured structurally as networks. Their elements do not make sense in isolation, obtaining meaning only from their situation relative to each other. In geographical maps, the elements form one interrelated schematic, charting the lay of the land as a whole. This enables people to see how territories intersect and how elements are configured within those territories. That language is similar was the great insight of Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structuralism.14 He argued that words, and the phenomena they signify, derive meaning from their position within networks of other linguistic signs.15 The concept of man, for instance, only makes sense in relation to oppositional terms that help to define it, such as woman, boy, and animal, with each of these juxtapositions framing the idea of man in a slightly different way. As Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, “Looking beyond the empirical facts to the meaning between them” is “more intelligible” than analyzing phenomena in isolation.16
In early structuralism, language networks were largely regarded as fixed. However, this perspective was superseded by poststructuralism, which recognized the dynamic nature of these networks. Influential theorists such as Jacques Derrida argued that meaning is not static17 but, as Geneviève Rail puts it, “slippery and elusive”18—open to multiple and shifting interpretations. To return to the example of sex categories, this slipperiness is seen in the way that dichotomies such as man and woman are increasingly contested in today’s more gender-aware cultural climate.19 But even if meanings are fluid, they still form within a network of relations.
This interrelatedness of words has three key features. The first could be called their proximity aspect. This refers to the idea that conceptually similar words signify phenomena situated near one another within state-space. For instance, contentment, joy, and bliss all occupy the broader realm of positive emotions. People often have a folk understanding of this proximity aspect, an intuitive sense of how words relate to each other conceptually and how similar or dissimilar they are to one another.20 It is then the task of fields such as psychology to map this conceptual space by means of a nomological network.21
Words are also related hierarchically, just as the brain itself organizes information.22 Actually, hierarchy is not quite the right word, since this has connotations of top-down rule, whereby higher-level elements dominate lower-level ones. A preferable term, coined by Arthur Koestler, is holarchy.23 This notion derives from another of Koestler’s neologisms, holon, which was adapted etymologically from the Greek holos, meaning all or whole, and the suffix on, suggestive of a part or particle. Koestler proposed holon to reflect the idea that everything in existence is simultaneously a whole and a part. For example, a person is a whole being yet part of a family; a family is a whole unit yet part of a community; and so on. Each element in any system is a holon: a whole unit relative to the level beneath it, as a family is with respect to its members, and a constituent part relative to the level above it, as a family is with respect to the community. Thus a holarchy refers to this arrangement in which holons are embedded within larger holons, which are in turn nested within still-larger holons.
So, to rephrase the sentence above, the second aspect of the interrelatedness of words is that they—and the phenomena they refer to—can generally be arranged into holarchies. Contentment, joy, and bliss can all be aggregated into the broader category of emotions—which itself can be grouped with categories such as thoughts, sensations, and perceptions into an overarching category of qualia. In terms of my state-space metaphor, each broader category covers a larger area of n-dimensional space than the finer-grained categories encompassed within it. Thus, qualia spans a larger area of state-space than emotions, which in turn covers more ground than specific emotions such as contentment or joy. In the context of this book, our overarching category of concern is well-being. This encompasses a very broad region of state-space, which includes feelings (discussed in chapter 2), relationships (chapter 3), and personal development (chapter 4). It is possible to arrange state-space holarchies in any number of ways according to one’s agenda and priorities.
Finally, words do not only make sense in relation to concepts that are close to them in state-space (the proximity aspect), or in relation to their location within various holarchies (the holarchical aspect). Words also derive meaning from the complex associations they form with other words. Here I’m picturing a vast, intricate web of links, in which each region of state-space—as represented by a word—is connected with many other different regions. A good analogy might be neural networks, in which each of the approximately 100 billion neurons in the average brain is connected to as many as tens of thousands of other neurons, generating up to 1,000 trillion synaptic links.24 Something similar occurs with words. This I call the “web aspect” of the network principle. Words come to be associated with a complex pattern of other signifiers, which helps give them their meanings.25 This happens at a cultural and an individual level. For instance, in the United States, the place-name Gettysburg has accrued a weighty network of connections to culturally important concepts relating to the American Civil War, which freights the word with significance. On a personal level, as individuals grow up, each forges idiosyncratic systems of associations with respect to specific terms. For example, we all come to associate happiness with a unique set of phenomena—certain people, places, actions, objects, and so on—whose salience is a product of personal experience.
The Granularity Principle
The notion of a holarchically arranged network brings us to the fourth principle: scalable granularity. As we saw earlier, this refers to the way maps can take on comparable levels of complexity irrespective of the size of the terrain represented, in a way somewhat analogous to Mandelbrot’s fractals.26 Google Maps makes this process vivid: as one zooms in on an area, the map’s granularity increases accordingly.
Language possesses similar power. To appreciate this, imagine a child entering school. He will gradually be introduced to a global cognitive map of phenomena, which will become increasingly familiar and more detailed over time. One “continent” may be the arts, another science, a third history, and so on. At first, these continents may lack any internal differentiation; the child has just a vague sense that art differs from science in some way. Soon though, he will begin to draw rudimentary boundaries separating the continents: music, painting, and dancing within the arts; biology, chemistry, and physics within science; and so on.
Essentially, the child is learning to recognize and create holarchies. Moreover, the principle of scalable granularity means it is possible to create increasingly fine-grained differentiations within these holarchies, repeatedly introducing new levels of complexity. The child may become passionate about music, for instance, and begin to zoom in on this area, learning to segment it according to music styles—classical, rock, reggae, and so on. Before starting school, these distinctions would probably not have been apparent conceptually or even perceptually; the child would have been able neither to recognize and label a particular style nor even, perhaps, to register the difference between them aurally. Maybe he had the inchoate intuition that songs heard differed in some indefinable way. But all that he was likely aware of was a vague region of experience labeled “music.” However, as the child develops, he learns to zoom in perceptually and mentally, becoming cognizant of ever more precise distinctions.
This process of zooming in can continue almost indefinitely. An interest in classical music may lead our student to learn to delineate different forms, from baroque to avant-garde. He may go on to study classical music at university, a context in which these distinctions would become yet more fine-grained. He will learn to distinguish aurally between sounds (recognizing a major from a minor seventh, say) and to identify and critique the work of different composers. He will also acquire terminological fluency enabling description of differences among pieces, from allegro to andante. Indeed, mastery of the granular terminology of a topic could be regarded as the essence of expertise.27 This point is central to the book, which is based on the premise that, by learning new vocabulary relating to well-being, people can cultivate greater expertise with respect to it.
The Guidance Principle
This notion of zooming in toward greater levels of expertise brings me to the final parallel between maps and words. I call it the guidance principle. Maps and words both constitute guides to existence. Geographical maps help people navigate their current surroundings and venture into new territory. Words have the power to do something similar. For a start, they enable us to orient ourselves with respect to what we are currently experiencing. Consider the condition alexithymia, whereby a person is unable to recognize or verbalize emotions.28 Both an alexithymic and a person else considered to possess high emotional differentiation might experience comparable feelings—intense joy, frustrated anger, and so on. However, whereas the alexithymic may be confused and even bewildered by his feelings, the high-differentiation individual has a precise awareness of what she is experiencing and is able to accurately identify her qualia. It is as if both people are in the same geographical location, but while the second benefits from a highly detailed map, the first has nothing more than a vague outline.
Furthermore, just as maps enable adventurers to travel to new lands, so too can words help us explore novel experiential realms. They alert us to phenomena we might not have previously encountered, or even been aware of, and can invite us to engage with these. Return to the example of the student becoming acquainted with classical music. There is a vast wealth of words pertaining to this genre—names of composers, historical periods, terms for musical styles and motifs. To a child with little appreciation for classical music, most of these words would be meaningless—signs whose referents are unknown. Encountering these words would be like glancing at a map of a foreign country he had never even heard of. But, just as the map may entice and even enable a visit to this distant land, so too might these music-related words invite our student to explore the world of classical music. In accepting the invitation, he would open himself up to a new realm of experiences, encountering a range of unfamiliar stimuli (e.g., musical pieces) and concomitant qualia (e.g., feelings). It is my contention that the words featured in this book likewise invite and enable people to experience phenomena relating to well-being that had hitherto been unfamiliar to or hidden from them.
Now, having elucidated the deep parallels between language and geographical maps, we can return to a key point: languages differ in how they chart the experiential world. As we shall see, this diversity opens a wealth of possibilities in terms of how we experience and understand life.
The Impact of Language and Culture
Having outlined a cartographic model of language, I can now address the point at the heart of this book: different languages carve up and map experiential state-space in different ways.* For as the world’s cultures and countries have developed language systems, they have had cause to create subtly different configurations of boundaries. This in turn affects how people in those cultures experience and understand the world. This claim has come to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
The Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis
The notion that culture, via language, influences thought has a long pedigree. This “linguistic relativity” principle traces back at least as far as the philosophers Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835).29 Herder was at the forefront of a Romantic nationalism that celebrated the uniqueness of the German “spirit” and valorized the German culture in which it was manifest. Crucially here, he attributed to language a pivotal role in the creation of this spirit. His seminal “Essay on the Origin of Language” helped to instantiate the idea of an intimate and unique relationship between a given people’s language and psychology.30 Humboldt’s philological study of the Basque language reinforced the point.31 Both scholars theorized that differences in the mentalities of individual cultures derive in part from the nature of their language, which in turn is shaped by variables such as climate and geography.
Later, these ideas found their most influential articulation through the work of anthropologist Edward Sapir32 and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf.33 They argued that language plays a constitutive role in the way people experience, understand, and even perceive the world.34 As Whorf put it in 1956, “We dissect nature along lines laid out by our native languages. … The world is presented as a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized … largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.”35 Whorf’s dissection is the process of drawing boundaries, demarcating distinct regions of state-space.
As with many influential theories, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis has generated considerable debate over the years, and has been adapted and construed by scholars in various ways. One question is just how strong claims of this sort ought to be. The strong-form hypothesis is effectively linguistic determinism, whereby language is seen as constitutive of thought. Relatedly, cognitive psychologists such as Lev Vygotsky and Valentin Voloshinov36 have argued for the inescapable intertwining of language and thought (albeit in a reciprocal, mutually constitutive way, rather than the former simply “determining” the latter). Voloshinov argued that the mind is fundamentally semiotic in nature, and that “outside the material of signs there is no psyche.” Sapir and Whorf also tended toward a strong stance. For example, Whorf assessed that, because the grammar of the Hopi language appeared to forego a linear sense of past, present, and future, the Hopi people experience time differently from Western peoples. Articulating Sapir and Whorf’s position, Penny Lee submits that there is “little point in arguing about whether language influences thought or thought influences language for the two are functionally entwined to such a degree in the course of individual development that they form a highly complex, but nevertheless systematically coherent, mode of cognitive activity which is not usefully described in conventionally dichotomizing terms as either ‘thought’ or ‘language.’”37
The strong, determinist perspective has been challenged by critics arguing in various ways for greater universality in human experience, irrespective of language or culture. For instance, Steven Pinker has countered that the Hopi experience of time does not differ greatly from that of Western peoples, in part because the brain innately perceives and organizes phenomena linearly.38
A milder form of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, known as linguistic relativism, is more widely accepted.39 This form simply holds that language shapes thought and experience, without determining it. This is my own position. As elucidated below, I contend that we can experience phenomena in the absence of language. That is, even if we lack the linguistic tools (e.g., a specific word) to identify and conceptualize something, we can still experience it. That said, these tools—untranslatable words, say—are cognitively useful, enabling better understanding of the phenomenon in question.
Against my view, a strong determinist might argue that we cannot consciously experience a phenomenon without a way of representing it in language. This appears to be Steven Katz’s stance with respect to spiritual experiences, for example.40 He takes issue with the claim, associated with Aldous Huxley,41 that there is a common core of mystical experiences accessed by contemplatives across cultures. Katz argues that it is impossible to have a “pure” spiritual experience—say, of a divine presence—unmediated by conceptual or cultural baggage. Every experience is necessarily filtered through the semiotic prism of conceptual thought. However, scholars such as Donald Evans and Richard King disagree.42 They argue that even if, after the event, people conceptualize and interpret spiritual experiences using culturally situated language, the event itself may be experienced directly, without conceptual mediation.
Indeed, King argues that any experience, not just mystical ones, can be unmediated. Even a mundane act such as drinking coffee, though mediated by cultural factors and personal expectations, “cannot be reduced to those factors alone.” Picture someone unfamiliar with the notion of coffee, consuming the beverage for the first time. Though she has no term for or experience with the drink, she will still have a direct sensory experience of its taste. Using the principles elucidated above, we might say she is entering a new region of experiential state-space. She has not yet learned to demarcate this space, thereby creating a region labeled “coffee.” After the event, as she inquires into a signifier (i.e., a word) for this new referent (i.e., the experience of drinking coffee), the region becomes circumscribed and labeled accordingly. As time goes by, she may link coffee to a network of associations—with pleasure or energy, for instance—that color the experience of drinking it. But the initial taste was purely a sensory event requiring no cultural mediation through language.*
However, even if people can experience phenomena for which they lack a conceptual label, the milder version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis may still apply. Though pure sensory experience is possible, culture, via language, can influence that experience.
Language and Culture
A key way in which language shapes experience is through the boundaries it creates within the experiential world. Crucially, languages all differ in this respect, which influences how their speakers experience and understand their lives. For a start, by demarcating a region of state-space and labeling it with a word, language creates salient objects. While it is possible to notice and experience those objects even if one’s attention hasn’t been guided by language, this outcome is arguably less likely. For instance, as I discuss in more detail in the next chapter, speakers of Japanese have developed a range of aesthetic concepts—wabi-sabi, famously—to express appreciation of ephemerality and the passage of time. In theory anyone could have a well-developed sense for this particular aesthetic, but one is more likely to encounter, recognize, and cultivate such values within a culture that has expressly identified them. Thanks to its demarcating language, Japanese speakers have the conceptual tools with which to represent and articulate these time-based aesthetics and so develop a richer and more sophisticated understanding of them. Non-speakers may of course have an intuitive appreciation of such aesthetics, but, without concerted attention guided by language, gain at best a vague, inchoate sensitivity to them.43
But why do languages differ in how they carve up the world? According to Anna Wierzbicka, one of the foremost scholars in this area, many of these differences can be attributed to the nature of the culture that created and/or uses the language in question.44 Here I use the term “culture” in the broadest possible sense, following Margaret McLaren, who defines it as “the way we are, both physically and mentally.”45 The “we” could be found at any scale, from the supranational (e.g., the West) to a local neighborhood.* Culture encompasses the ways in which group members conduct their lives, manage their relationships, express their thoughts and feelings, arrange work (i.e., modes of production), and so on. Culture also refers to the way in which groups engage with and respond to myriad factors that influence their existence—factors both nonhuman (e.g., geography, climate) and human (e.g., the group’s history and traditions, relationships with other groups). Although cultures are not isolated monads—a point to which I will turn shortly—it is fair to say that a relatively stable set of attributes defines individual groups and binds the people within. Language is one source of these ties; as Wierzbicka notes, “There is a very close link between the life of a society and the lexicon of the language spoken by it.”46
Consider a famous—or possibly infamous—example of the intersection of language and culture: the notion that “Eskimos” have many different words for snow.* This claim has reached the status of an urban legend, while also attracting criticism for being misleading and promoting a misunderstanding of the nature of language.47 The intricacies of the debate around this topic shed light on whether languages do indeed carve up the experiential world in unique ways.
The apparently unusual diversity of Eskimo words for snow was first described by the pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas, Sapir’s mentor. In his 1911 Handbook of American Indian Languages, Boas noted four different Eskimo words for varieties of snow: aput (snow on the ground), gana (falling snow), piqsirpoq (drifting snow), and qimuqsuq (a snow drift).48 Whorf later added three more terms, leading to all manner of imaginative expansions, until some reports suggested there are as many as 400 different Eskimo words on this theme.49
Amid such runaway inflation, Geoffrey Pullum describes the whole notion as a “hoax.”50 Yet the situation is perhaps a little more nuanced. The issue comes down to what we mean by a word. As Pullum notes, Eskimo-Aleut languages are agglutinative, meaning that complex words are easily created by combining morphemes. For example, the West Greenlandic word siku, meaning ice, can be combined with other morphemes to create many compounds, such as sikuliaq (pack ice), sikuaq (new ice), and sikurluk (melting ice). An agglutinative language could, in theory, have almost an unlimited range of words pertaining to snow.
As Pullum sees it, this means that, even if Eskimos technically have many different words for snow, they do not necessarily possess greater lexical complexity in this arena than do English speakers. The difference is just that, in English, we use adjectives rather than agglutination, creating compound phrases such as “melting snow.”
But while Pullum is technically correct, I disagree in pragmatic terms, as the size and scope of a lexicon ultimately are determined by usage. Yes, both Eskimo and English speakers can articulate many terms relating to snow and ice, the former through agglutination, the latter through adjectival phrases. But that doesn’t mean English speakers do so in practice. Eskimo culture is influenced by a physical environment dominated by snow and ice in a way that most English-speaking cultures are not. As such, Eskimo-Aleut languages contain many more snow-and-ice words in common usage than does English. In his analysis of the North Sami language of the Arctic and sub-Arctic, for instance, Ole Henrik Magga points out that knowledge of snow and ice is a “necessity for subsistence and survival.”51 Magga estimates that there are over a thousand such lexemes in common usage. By contrast, snow and ice are not a significant factor in the geography where English first developed. As a result, terms for snow and ice are not prominent in English as it is mostly used, even if, theoretically, such terms could proliferate in English-speaking cultures. However, in English-speaking contexts where snow and ice are prominent—for instance in subcultures centered on skiing or snowboarding52—then the lexicon may be enriched accordingly.
But overall, this general difference between Eskimo-Aleut and English languages nicely illustrates the cartographic principles at the heart of this book. Both Eskimo and English-speaking cultures can, in theory, access a similar state-space, here concerning the ability to perceive or identify different types of snow and ice. However, due to cultural factors (e.g., geography), these cultures do not carve up the state-space in the same way. As snow and ice are of existential importance in Eskimo cultures, speakers of Eskimo languages find it prudent to impose many more boundaries on this state-space—per the principle of granularity—thereby allowing finer-grained distinctions. Conversely, it strikes me that English speakers have developed a particularly rich lexicon with respect to rain, which befits the climatic conditions of places like the United Kingdom.
I think it’s therefore reasonable to assert that cultures linguistically parse the world in idiosyncratic ways that differentially influence how people in those cultures experience and understand life. But cultures are not hermetically sealed, nor are they fixed in time. They are, as Wierzbicka puts it, “heterogeneous, historically changing, interconnected, and … ‘continually exchanging materials.’”53 Thus the linguistic boundaries that cultures impose are not static either. These boundaries constantly evolve in part through individual cultures’ interactions with each other. A fascinating example of such exchange, central to this book, is words.
Borrowing Words
When people strive to describe the cultural dynamism of the United States, they often choose the metaphor of a melting pot, evoking the intermingling of people from all parts of the globe. Less commonly noted is that English itself is such a melting pot, borrowing and assimilating words from multiple languages in ways that undoubtedly leave it enriched, that is, capable of delineating the world with greater nuance and detail.* Indeed, the language itself came into being through borrowing and has continued to evolve that way.
The roots of English lie in Proto-Germanic languages, which are part of the broader Indo-European language family. Although the historical details are speculative and much debated, Anthony Grant suggests that these Proto-Germanic languages began to diversify from the Indo-European tree around 500 BCE. Northwest Germanic split off first, followed a few hundred years later by West Germanic.54 It was from the latter that English began to emerge around the fifth century CE, when the British Isles were invaded and settled by three Germanic tribes: the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, together with a smaller number of Franks and Frisians.55 As these groups attained dominance in England, their West-Germanic language supplanted those of Roman Britain, namely Latin and Brittonic.56 Subsequently, this imported language evolved through three main phases: Old English (ca. 450–1100 CE), Middle English (ca. 1100–1500), and Modern English, itself split into early (ca. 1500–1800) and late periods (1800–).57 One feature of this evolution was lexicalization: adding new words and phrases to the corpus of vocabulary.58
Sometimes lexicalization involves coining new words. This occurs when morphemes are combined in novel ways (e.g., “Brexit”). It also occurs when existing words are creatively adapted, as in the case of “boredom,” which entered English in 1852 when Charles Dickens deployed the verb “to bore”—to pierce or wear down—to depict Lady Dedlock’s apathetic state in his novel Bleak House.59 Often though, words arrive through borrowing from other languages.60
Borrowed words are those that cannot be taken back “to the earliest known stages of a language,”61 which, in the case of Old English, was mainly the lexicon imported from West Germanic. The first main phase of borrowing occurred following the Norman invasion of 1066. This event inaugurated a new phase of language development—known as Middle English—as the conquerors brought French to the British Isles. The result was a temporary linguistic class division, with the upper echelons of society switching mainly to French while the lower classes continued to speak Old English.62
Eventually, English regained dominance, but with the addition of numerous French words. French itself had roots in, and borrowings from, Latin, Arabic, and other languages, just as these had their own influences, especially Greek.63 Thus some of the French terms borrowed by English themselves derived from elsewhere, producing a chain of transmission. For instance, the word “idea” originates in Greek but traveled via Latin and then French before being adopted by English.64
Finally, Modern English borrowed directly from numerous languages, particularly Greek and Latin. And some neologisms, coined for new inventions or concepts, are in fact compounds of Greek and Latin. For instance, television combines the Greek stem têle with the Latin vīsiō, thereby conveying a meaning of “far seeing.”65
As such, English is a veritable cornucopia of borrowed words (with cornucopia itself deriving from the Latin cornu copiae, a mythical “horn of plenty” that is a symbol of nourishment and abundance).66 Of the more than 600,000 lexemes in the OED, between 3267 and 41 percent68 are thought to be borrowed. (These percentages are relatively high in comparison to other languages. Uri Tadmor estimates a borrowing range of 62 percent at the upper end—for Selice Romani, a dialect in Slovakia—to just 1.2 percent at the lower, namely for Mandarin.69) Anthony Grant finds that 25 percent of English lexemes were borrowed from French, 8 percent from Latin, 3.5 percent from Old Norse, 2 percent from Greek, and 1.3 percent from Dutch and Middle-Low German.70 A further 3.5 percent come from various other languages, including “pepper” (from Sanskrit, via Greek and Latin), “zero” (Arabic, via Italian), “banana” (Wolof, via Spanish), “silk” (Mongolian, via Latin), “tea” (a Tibeto-Burman language, via Chinese, via Dutch), and “taboo” (Tongan). The prevalence of borrowed words has been studied with respect to a wide range of source languages, including Arabic, Japanese, and Spanish.71
Collectively, these borrowings are usually referred to as loanwords. However, more specific terminology recognizes that such words can be at different stages of the borrowing process. Appropriately enough, this terminology itself involves loanwords (from German), namely Gastwörter (guest-words), Fremdwörter (foreignisms), and Lehnwörter (loanwords proper).72 These gradations allow linguists to describe varying degrees of assimilation. Least assimilated are Gastwörter, whose foreign status is still explicit. Using the language of immigration, the OED previously referred to these as “aliens”—in contrast to Fremdwörter, which were labeled “denizens,” and Lehnwörter, deemed “naturals.” Gastwörter usually retain the pronunciation, orthography, grammar, and meaning of their original language; are limited to specialist (e.g., academic) vocabularies; and are italicized in type. Gastwörter itself is a Gastwort, with its usage in English generally confined to linguists.
Fremdwörter are more fully assimilated. They have been welcomed into the host language as stable and widely used entries in the lexicon, but nevertheless still tend to be perceived as foreign words. A well-known example is Schadenfreude, which refers to the pleasure taken in another’s misfortune. Lehnwörter, finally, are so well integrated into the host language that speakers do not regard, or even recognize, them as being of foreign origin. These words are basically indistinguishable from the rest of the lexicon and are amenable to normal rules of word use and formation. The latter is itself one such word, derived from the Latin formationem, via the Old French formacion.
In the act of borrowing, the loanword usually becomes an unanalyzable unit in the recipient language.73 That is, the corresponding word source in the donating language can be complex or even phrasal, but this internal structure is generally lost when it enters the host language. Hence, when transferred to English-speaking contexts, the French notion of joie de vivre becomes an indivisible lexeme unto itself, its constituent elements undifferentiated in borrowed usage. That said, if sufficient numbers of semantically related complex words enter a language, it may be possible for speakers to reconstitute and appreciate their morphological structure. This is often the case with neoclassical compounds using Greek or Latin. For instance, speakers may come to appreciate that words featuring the Greek root ethno- (e.g., ethnic, ethnography) all relate to nationhood in some way.
Besides loanwords per se, other varieties of borrowing exist. One is loan translations, or calques.74 In these cases, only the word’s meaning is borrowed, not its form. For instance, English includes two near-synonyms for God: omnipotent and almighty. Whereas omnipotent is a genuine Lehnwort (from the Latin omnipotēns), almighty borrows the meaning, but converts it into English via its component parts (omni- = all, potēns = mighty). Another variety is the loan blend, which occur when borrowed words are adapted using elements from the host language. For instance, Middle English featured the word brownetta, in which “brunette,” borrowed from Italian, was combined with the native “brown.” We also have semantic borrowing, which occurs when words take on new or additional meanings. Although English had borrowed the verb “to present” from Latin (via French) around the fourteenth century, the word acquired further meanings from French in the sixteenth century (e.g., to put on a show). Last, there is grammatical borrowing. English has assimilated numerous derivational morphemes—particularly from Latin (e.g., pre-) and Greek (e.g., anti-)—many of which can be used with stems of any origin.75
And then there exists a further world of words not yet borrowed. They could, and arguably should, become loanwords. I’d like to take the liberty of coining a new Gastwort to delineate such words: Fremderwort, “stranger word.” As we’ll see in the coming chapters, many such words might be of interest to us, bringing to mind the sentiment that a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met.
This brings up a crucial question: Why are words borrowed? Essentially, what unites Gast-, Fremd-, Lehn-, and, Fremderwörter is that they often tend to be untranslatable. These words reveal “semantic gaps” in the languages lacking equivalent terms—languages that may then borrow these words to fill such gaps.
Semantic Gaps
Loanwords tend to start out as innovations in speech.76 This kind of innovation might happen in several ways. Sometimes it arises through code-switching: a bilingual person using words from one language while speaking the other.77 Sometimes speech innovations derive from socio-political changes, as with the Norman invasion.78 Then there is the process of cultural influence or hegemony, as with the importation of American English terminology into other cultures over recent decades.79
But what makes a loanword stick? What does it do that makes it useful to a host language? To tackle this question, we must keep in mind the distinction between core and cultural borrowings.80 Core borrowings occur when a new loanword replicates a word that already exists in the host language. The words may coexist; the loanword could replace the native word, which might have already fallen into disuse; or the loanword may augment the native word by introducing previously absent nuances of meaning. Core borrowings often occur for sociolinguistic reasons, whereby foreign words can convey intellectual prestige and cultural capital.81 While the historical flow of core borrowings is a fascinating topic in itself, it is not of particular concern to us here, since these loanwords have English equivalents, and so are not untranslatable.
By contrast, the second category, cultural borrowing, is central to my purposes. Martin Haspelmath refers to these as “loanwords by necessity,” for the recipient language lacks its own word for the referent in question.82 This sort of borrowing might occur when a new invention, practice, or idea is introduced into a culture. In such cases, a loanword is used for pragmatic reasons: in the absence of an appropriate native word or coinage, the loanword is taken up because it works.83 It is cognitively and socially useful, allowing speakers to articulate notions that they had previously struggled to.
In the terminology of Adrienne Lehrer—who drew on earlier work by Noam Chomsky—such words bridge “lexical gaps.”84 More specifically, they fill semantic gaps, which involve “the lack of a convenient word to express what [the speaker] wants to speak about,” as Lehrer puts it.85 This feature of loanwords is clear in Tadmor’s analysis of loanword adoption across multiple languages.86 He observes that borrowing tends to supply words for activities susceptible to the introduction of novel ideas. These include religious practice (an estimated 41 percent of religious terms in most languages are loanwords) and clothing and grooming (39 percent). Aspects of life less susceptible to innovation are less likely to face semantic gaps and thus involve less borrowing. Thus, languages usually provide terms relating to the body (14 percent loanwords), spatial relations (14 percent), and sense perception (11 percent) without recourse to borrowing: these are so basic and immutable that languages rarely have to rely on each other in order to develop appropriate terminology.
One might say that a semantic gap refers to a region of state-space that has not been circumscribed and labeled by a given language. Semantic gaps persist for a variety of reasons. For instance, within the gap might be a phenomenon that speakers of a given language have not experienced in much depth or detail. To return to the example above, since snow is not a prominent part of cultures where English developed, the language has relatively little corresponding terminology.
It may also be that speakers are familiar with the region of state-space in question but carve it up differently than do speakers of other languages. For example, many emotion theorists—most prominently Paul Ekman87—contend that people the world over have comparable emotional experiences, that we navigate the same general spectrum of feelings. But languages may delineate this affective terrain in different ways, such as by describing a particular class of emotion in more granular ways. For example, linguists have observed that the English concept of love is “polysemous in the extreme.”88 That is, the term spans a great range of feelings, covering a large swathe of state-space. By contrast, other languages may have developed a more nuanced lexicon to denote various types of love. As I explore in chapter 3, Greek is especially prolific in this regard.89
It is semantic gaps that arguably make words untranslatable, and opportune for borrowing. That said, I recognize that the notion of untranslatability can be problematic, and is disliked by some linguists (while others regard it as perfectly acceptable90). On the one hand, it could be argued that no word is ever truly translatable. As we have seen, post-/structuralism holds that words are embedded within complex webs of meanings and traditions; therefore, something is always lost in the act of translation, some nuance or meaning is not carried over so that the process is always “inexact.”91 On the other hand, it may be that nothing is ever genuinely untranslatable. As Pullum suggests, even if a term lacks an exact equivalent in another language, it is usually possible to convey a sense of its meaning in a few words, or at most a few sentences. For this reason, some scholars prefer the designation “unlexicalized” to untranslatable. However, I suggest for pragmatic reasons that we retain the notion of untranslatability for cases when there exists no exact match for a term used by speakers of other languages.
The notion of borrowing such words is also problematic. A particular issue is that they do not necessarily retain the meanings they had in their original language. As discussed above in relation to the network principle, every word is embedded within networks of other terms that endow it with meaning. Thus, it is hard to understand a word in isolation from other terms in a system and the ways it is deployed in context. If words are taken out of their donor language, and inserted into a host language, this rich network of associations is not necessarily retained. Indeed, some scholars who endorse strong linguistic determinism argue that unless a person is enmeshed within the culture that produced a given word, he would be unable to fully understand or experience the phenomenon to which the word refers. For instance, Charles Taylor argues there is no way out of the “hermeneutic circle”: concepts can only be understood with reference to other concepts within the language to which they belong. As he puts it, “We can often experience what it is like to be on the outside [of the circle] when we encounter the feeling, action, and experiential meaning language of another civilization. Here there is no translation, no way of explaining in other, more accessible concepts.”92
However, articulating a milder view, Wierzbicka contends that we can escape the hermeneutic circle and approximate a feel for the meanings of untranslatable words.93 True, people not part of a given culture may not appreciate the full richness of a term. As Wierzbicka puts it, using Wittgenstein’s revealing phrase, “Verbal explanations of [untranslatable] concepts cannot replace experiential familiarity with them and with their functioning in the local ‘stream of life.’”94 But, Wierzbicka argues, “It is not true that no verbal explanations illuminating to outsiders are possible at all.” This is especially the case if one does have some experiential familiarity with the phenomenon in question, however vague, even if one previously lacked a word to signify it.
The word karma, for instance, transmits something of its essence even to users who do not understand its structural connection to its original language, Sanskrit. In that context, karma refers broadly to causality in ethics. Most English speakers who use this word probably do not know how it relates to other Sanskrit terms nor its wealth of meanings in Hindu and Buddhist teachings. Nevertheless, English speakers find the word useful and arguably deploy it in ways that are not completely discordant with its original meanings.95 Moreover, in the process of borrowing, loanwords also organically form network connections with relevant concepts in the new host language. For example, English speakers may come to understand karma in relation to their own ideas surrounding sin and justice stemming from various Western religious and nonreligious traditions.
In summary, notwithstanding the caveats above about the notion of untranslatability and the nature of the borrowing process, the phenomenon of untranslatable words rests upon the concept of semantic gaps. Visual aids may help to illustrate how semantic gaps relate to the kind of untranslatability I have in mind. The following figures are intended to depict the n-dimensional state-space of the experiential world, although it is only possible to portray this on the page as a two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional area. In the figures, I use spheres to represent the region of state-space delineated by given words. Of course, as noted above, I recognize that words can be defined and deployed in different ways by different people, and, indeed, by the same person at different times. Thus, it is better to regard these circumscribed regions as a hazy cloud of possibilities rather than as a cleanly demarcated area.
As a reference point, figure 1.1 depicts a case in which a non-English word is regarded as having an approximate equivalent in English. I pair the English “love” with its German counterpart, and cognate, Liebe.* Because their cultural backgrounds ensure that “love” and Liebe have slightly different nuances and layers of meaning, I have represented these as nearly overlapping spheres—each is a close translation of the other, if not a perfect one.
Figure 1.1 Nearly overlapping regions of state-space, representing a near-perfect equivalency between two words.
By contrast, the next three figures represent the three main ways in which a word may be regarded as untranslatable. All three also take the English word “love” as their reference point. Figure 1.2 represents instances in which a non-English word occupies a region of state-space that has not been similarly delineated by any English word. In such cases, it is most likely that some English words capture aspects of the word in question, just as these English words in turn will have referents and meanings not included within the non-English word. I refer to this as “overlap-based” untranslatability, shown here by two somewhat overlapping spheres. The example uses the German term Sehnsucht, which roughly translates as “life-longings.” Sehnsucht encompasses certain features of love, such as a deep appreciation and yearning for some object. However, as psychometric investigation by Susanne Scheibe and colleagues indicate, Sehnsucht also incorporates meanings not usually implied by the term love, including dissatisfaction with one’s current state, and an appreciation of the ambivalent nature of life (i.e., the recognition that life is inevitably imperfect, and involves a blend of highs and lows).96
Figure 1.2 Somewhat-overlapping regions of state-space, representing overlap-based untranslatability.
The second and third forms of untranslatability reflect the network principle, particularly holarchy, whereby concepts can be encompassed by wider ones. These forms are also examples of the granularity principle, whereby one can zoom in and out of a given region of state-space. Thus, it is possible for a non-English word to be untranslatable because it encompasses a region of state-space smaller or larger than that encompassed by a comparable English word. That is, the meaning of the foreign word can be either more or less specific. In figure 1.3, I compare the English “love” to the narrower Greek agápē. Because agápē requires selflessness and charitability—which love can, but need not, incorporate—it occupies a smaller region of state-space. I call this “specificity-based” untranslatability.
Figure 1.3 An English word encompassing a non-English word, representing specificity-based untranslatability.
Figure 1.4 inverts this condition: the non-English word occupies a larger region of state-space. Here, “love” is enfolded by the Chinese Tao, which could be regarded as the dynamic process of reality itself, encompassing everything in existence.97 This is a case of “generality-based” untranslatability. Indeed, it is because some concepts, such as Tao, are all-encompassing that there are only three main kinds of untranslatability. It is not theoretically possible for a word to occupy a region of state-space that is unoccupied by another word, as all concepts could be enfolded by the Tao and similar notions, such as the Sanskrit Brahman.
Figure 1.4 A non-English word encompassing an English word, representing generality-based untranslatability.
I’ve argued that the significance of untranslatable words is that they can augment or refine the maps provided by one’s own language. Such words indicate the existence of phenomena—regions of experiential state-space—overlooked or undervalued by a given culture (in our case here, English-speaking cultures). These possibilities apply to all aspects of existence, not least of all well-being.
Exploring Well-Being
One could recognize the value of untranslatable words in all areas of life, but in this book I focus on well-being specifically. Although I do so because well-being is my field of scholarship—I am a lecturer and researcher in positive psychology—more fundamentally it is because I believe it to be a topic of great importance. It is also one that would benefit greatly from an exploration of untranslatable words, as academic understanding of well-being in fields such as positive psychology has thus far been rather Western-centric.
Western Perspectives on Well-Being
Positive psychology (PP) emerged in 1998, with Martin Seligman’s inaugural address as president of the American Psychological Association.98 Of course, many topics at the heart of PP—from the nature of happiness to the components of the good life—have been debated for millennia. And in the twentieth-century, scholars interested in humanistic psychology, such as the pioneering Abraham Maslow, further dove into these issues.99 But the concerns of mainstream psychology generally lay elsewhere, until PP started capturing the attention of students and scholars in the late twentieth century (even if some regarded it skeptically as an eye-catching reworking of humanistic psychology).100
The field soon developed a body of empirical and theoretical work. For instance, drawing on historical ideas around happiness heavily debated by philosophers in ancient Greece, PP set about investigating the distinction between two main forms of well-being: hedonic (or “subjective”)101 and eudaimonic (or “psychological”).102 The latter represents a rare instance of psychology already having adopted an untranslatable word, eudaimonia, which was deployed by the likes of Aristotle to convey the notion of a virtuous and meaningful life.103 Researchers then sought to elucidate the nature of these types of well-being, including identifying their subsidiary elements (in a good illustration of holarchical networks). Thus, today, subjective well-being is widely regarded as involving a cognitive component (judgments of life satisfaction) and an affective component (the ratio of positive to negative affect). Psychological well-being, on Carol Ryff’s influential model, comprises six main dimensions: autonomy, self-acceptance, high-quality relationships, environmental mastery, meaning in life, and psychological development.104
As with any field—particularly one that has risen quickly to prominence—PP has received its fair share of criticism. Prominent among them is that it has developed and promulgated a somewhat culturally specific understanding of well-being, derived mainly from Western experience.105 Much, though not all, of the empirical work in PP has relied on participants described by Joe Henrich and colleagues as WEIRD: they belong to societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic.106
Critics therefore charge that the field is biased toward Western ways of thinking and conceptualizing the world, and that its understanding of well-being is thus incomplete. For example, Dana Becker and Jeanne Marecek argue that PP has been influenced by a North American tradition of “expressive individualism,”107 defined elsewhere as the “unmitigated reference to the value of the individual self.”108 As a result, the field has tended to view well-being primarily in individual psychological terms—that is, as a private mental state over which people retain control—while largely overlooking social factors that influence well-being, such as socioeconomic processes.109
A crucial aspect of PP’s Western-centric bias is that its nomological network has mainly been structured in terms of the contours of the English language (with valuable exceptions, particularly eudaimonia). For instance, English has demarcated certain regions of state-space using constructs such as hope and optimism. Following this semantic structure, PP has set about identifying the properties of these regions by exploring what hope and optimism consist of.
While that kind of endeavor is valuable, what about regions of state-space that haven’t been identified or labeled in English? There may be areas of real importance to well-being that have not figured into PP because they have not been represented in English. However, it is possible that these regions have been identified in other languages, resulting in an untranslatable word.
Exploring Untranslatable Words
In light of the critiques aired above, there has been a growing movement in PP toward cross-cultural scholarship, of which my project is a part. This movement partly represents Western scholars’ response to these critiques, as in the pioneering efforts of the likes of Robert Biswas-Diener.110 And it also reflects burgeoning interest in PP among scholars in non-Western countries such as China.111
Following the work of John Berry, I have isolated universalist and relativist trends in this emergent “positive cross-cultural psychology.”112 Universalism is more prevalent. This sort of research examines non-Western societies through the prism of Western psychological concepts, which are generally deemed universally applicable. Methods frequently include large-scale cross-cultural surveys. In Biswas-Diener’s analysis of the Inughuit, Amish, and Maasai, for instance, people are assessed on standardized measures developed in Western settings—specifically, subjective well-being.113 These kinds of studies rarely dwell on the possibility that there may be meaningful cross-cultural differences in the way well-being itself is experienced or constructed. As the economist Lord Richard Layard put it, “Of course one could question whether the word for ‘happy’ (or ‘satisfied’) means the same thing in different languages. If it doesn’t, we can learn nothing by comparing different countries. In fact it does.”114
Not all researchers in the field are comfortable with this reassuring perspective, though. Relativists, myself included, believe it is essential to explore and account for variation in the way people of different cultures relate to well-being—including how they define, experience, and report it.115
It was in the interest of adding to this relativist cross-cultural sensitivity that I embarked on a project to explore untranslatable words relating to well-being. My initial work involved a quasi-systematic review of academic literature and online media (e.g., websites and blogs)—quasi in the sense that there was not enough source material in academic psychology journals to permit a formal systematic review. I began by examining the first twenty relevant websites Google returned for the string “untranslatable words.” On these sites, I looked for any word pertaining to well-being broadly construed, a category including health, happiness, success, and spirituality. This generated 131 words.
I then searched Google one language at a time, restricting myself to the official language of each of the world’s 194 recognized countries,116 by entering the string “[language] concept of” and “well-being” into the search engine. Each time, I entered the name of a different language. I browsed the first ten pages of each search result for phenomena related to well-being presented as unique to particular cultures. This strategy generated a further seventy-seven words.
Finally, I canvassed staff and students at my university, as well as family, friends, and acquaintances. This yielded another 8 words, for a total of 216.
I checked these words and their descriptions for accuracy by consulting native speakers, online dictionaries, and peer-reviewed academic sources when available. I then analyzed the words using a variation of grounded theory, an inductive approach to analysis of qualitative data.117 Grounded theory largely involves examining data to see what themes emerge from it, then categorizing these themes into concepts that may form the basis of a new theory. The process is commonly employed with conventional qualitative data, such as interview transcripts. However, the process is adaptable, with considerable heterogeneity among studies purporting to use it.118
Grounded theory proceeds in three main stages. In the first, open coding, the researcher examines the data for emergent themes. I looked for words that appeared to share a common conceptual basis and grouped these under that theme. The second stage is axial coding, or cross-comparison to establish clusters of related themes. I compared the themes and then grouped them into categories, again based on conceptual similarity. Finally, the categories themselves are interpreted according to an overarching theoretical construct—well-being, in my analysis—which encompasses the data as a whole. The product in my case was an overarching accounting of the dimensions of well-being and their interrelationships.
There is significance in analyzing words thematically in this way (as opposed to, for instance, focusing primarily on their cultural origin). If one believes, with the strong relativists, that words are relevant only in the communities that created them—since outsiders would not be able to understand or experience the phenomena in question119—one would likely analyze words by culture. One might draw conclusions about people on the basis of their lexical habits, but those conclusions would not be generalizable to outsiders. However, I am a mild relativist.120 I have argued that words, including untranslatable ones, may have universal relevance. It is my contention that all people—regardless of their cultural background and context—might be able to experience and appreciate the phenomenon in question, at least to some degree. As such, I have approached the words thematically, exploring how they align with the current nomological network of constructs in PP. In that way, we can appreciate how these words may be able to augment English-speakers’ maps of well-being (as well as the maps of those who speak other languages).
My grounded-theory analysis produced six main categories of untranslatable words: positive feelings, ambivalent feelings, love, prosociality, character, and spirituality. I aggregated these six into three meta-categories: feelings (positive and ambivalent), relationships (love and prosociality), and personal development (character and spirituality). Thus, a convenient acronym—something academics, myself included, cannot resist—for this emergent theory of well-being might be the FRD model of well-being: feelings, relationships, and development.
These are arguably the three fundamental domains of well-being, covering respectively the main ways in which it is experienced (felt), influenced (through relationships),* and cultivated (in personal development). In this book, I explore each of these meta-categories over three separate chapters, analyzing the untranslatable words comprising the meta-category and discussing the thematic connections among them.
Before I turn to these chapters, I should note two sorts of caveats, one related to the contents of the lexicography, the other to the limits of translation.
As to the lexicography, it has expanded significantly since the publication of the paper and now contains more than 900 words and counting. The growth of the lexicography has certain implications. First, from the new words I have derived new themes, which I have added to the existing categories. There has been no need to modify the higher-level categories developed in the paper, though, which speaks to their robustness in accounting for the domains of well-being.
Second, while this book aims to give a comprehensive account of the lexicography, only about one-third of the accumulated words are discussed. Especially deep themes, containing many words, are treated selectively rather than exhaustively; I aim to give a good sense of the theme, not laboriously describe every term.
Third, and relatedly, the lexicography is surely incomplete. It currently includes words from only just under one hundred languages, but there are more than 7,000 languages currently in existence,121 a figure that grows further when dialects and linguistic subcultures are taken into account. It would be far beyond the capacity of this book—and probably any one person in a lifetime—to identify all relevant words. That said, as I discuss in the concluding chapter, I hope that this book will provide the foundation for further collection and analysis of untranslatable words.
The second caveat comes back to the prima facie paradox of writing in English about untranslatable words. After all, their defining feature is that they evade translation. However, as noted above, untranslatability just means lack of an exact equivalent in another language (in our case, English); it is usually still possible to convey a basic sense of meaning in a few words or sentences. Alas, this is the most I can do in the context of this book. To explore deeply the nuances of a term—its etymology, patterns of usage, diverse interpretations, and so on—would require at least an academic paper. As noted, such papers have been written about Sehnsucht, and similarly the Portuguese term saudade, which likewise approximates to a feeling of longing.122 In order to conduct a comparative assessment, I must be more restrained. My aim is to be accurate, if not comprehensive.
To at least “catch the spirit” of the original word123—if only in part—I have consulted dictionaries and scholarly sources for each and have checked my descriptions and interpretations with native speakers. But, even then, it is probably not possible to arrive at a depiction that would satisfy all speakers of the donor languages represented here. Moreover, the explanations in this book cannot avoid the imprint of my individual reading of the source material, influenced by my background, beliefs, and biases, which I discuss further in the final chapter.
To provide a sense of how we might begin to translate the untranslatable—and to highlight some of the issues and complexities involved in doing so—in the next chapter I discuss the Sanskrit term smṛti in some depth. While it will not be possible to extensively analyze all of the words in this way, the discussion of smṛti serves as a case study of the concerns outlined above, which bear on the lexicography as a whole. With that in mind, let’s turn to the first of the three meta-categories, feelings.
