Common culture turns the complex-and-odd into fluid-and-simple

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How complex are the concepts behind untranslatable words for the foreign speaker?

Untranslatable words are such because they capture a feeling or concept that has not been distinctly named in another language. Why does this happen? The difference this makes is that with one word we can easily express and share (in the sense of communicating it, establishing a common understanding of it between us) that particular feeling.

When we are not entirely sure what we are feeling, but the meaning of a particular word comes close, we will use that word. In doing so, we are in a way invoking the feeling that the other person understands by that word, while we are trying to express some similar feeling that we do not have the proper term for¹.

When we are faced with a concept we deem complex, and that we can only handle at the rational level, it seems almost inconceivable to include it in our thoughts or our speaking with the simplicity of a single word: how can you convey terms foreign to English like zozobra, or saudade in the relentless speed and conciseness that is expected in everyday speaking? Or how do we cobble together a series of terms into a shaky sentence that explains with the same speed the feeling that saudade would instantly convey? How do we achieve it when the feeling is just not conventionally expressed in our language?

And these examples are simply a sliver of the countless phenomena (objective, subjective, intersubjective, imaginative, feelings included) that slip through the cracks. That is, ideas that do not circulate in conversations because they have never been conventionally codified into a single concept.

Ideas codified into single words are closer to being understood instinctually

When we lack the fluidity that a conventional single concept such as saudade facilitates, we equally lack the privilege of having an instinctual understanding of it. Thus, we have no choice but to think about it rationally.

The rational level requires the energy of our deliberate attention. It needs to pick the concept apart in order to understand it —like practising passages from a musical piece while we are still far from able to play them fluidly without concentrated, self-conscious attention.

And yet, we humans can thoroughly internalise incredibly complex cognitive operations such as writing, translating alphabet to idea, speaking, playing music, writing, or maths, until they become second nature. By this I mean that the potential to incorporate complex things like second-nature is common in humans, assuming circumstances are adequate.

Personal concepts are easier thought when codified in a broader common culture

But language only works in community. Again, both community and the verb to communicate are rooted in the same idea of what is common: communicating is making the form that an expressed thought takes common among the communicating parties. Thus, the impossibility to express complex yet as-relevant-as-ever concepts (or words, feelings), and combining them in sentences to express new constructive thoughts, is, in my view, a cultural issue; it is not an issue of human inability.

The idea of nostalgia could very well lack a single word to be expressed, such as saudade doesn’t have an English word and needs to be expressed with at least a sentence. After all, both are equally complex feelings. Yet, because it has been codified and it freely circulates in societal and cultural expression, reaffirming its meaning over and over, it is instantly recognisable for everyone.

And then less visceral ideas such as the Japanese ma, which roughly translates to negative space, is something that seems complex and difficult to understand for a non-Japanese speaker, because she has not internalised the idea in order to be able to easily circulate it through words, fluidly expressing it, and being instantly understood.

The challenge lies in the fact that things that are complex but deeply relevant can only be thoroughly digested —understood almost viscerally like second nature, an intuition, or a musical piece we know inside out— when they become communal. They **need to be communicable, a part of a common culture, known and practised by multiple minds.

In fact, it is also this communal understanding that makes a complex idea more intelligible and applicable at the individual level. Complex ideas acquire communicational and cognitive velocity (fluidity in thinking about them and combining them with other ideas) only through a common culture.

Common cultures can emerge from all that is important but remains unspoken

And the good news is that these cultures do not have to be large from the outset. They can be erected upon initial small groups of people who feel the world in a similar way, and are seeking a way of sharing this giving some kind of form to this experiencing of the world. In doing so, they can better understand this particular way of feeling, think and talk about it more fluidly, and translate it into action.

Over time, as the contents of that common culture —with its own universe of symbols— grow more commonly intelligible and communicable, the culture broadens and proliferates; it finds an increasing number of adherents insofar as it speaks to more people who were looking for a shared framework resembling it, but needed more intelligibility to pay attention to it in the first place.

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1. This is a great trick of the mind. It is part of why language can feel like reality-distorting magic: the word serves as the intermediary meshing together one person’s idea of the word’s signified feeling with the feeling that we are intending to communicate. The result is something new and mutual, yet we remain disconnected by the word’s failure to communicate what we really intended. ↩︎