Discussion Forum (Archived)
Guest
Waldeinsamkeit (noun): the mysterious and sometimes creepy sense of solitude experienced when alone in a deep forest.
Yeah, it hasn't quite made the full transition to English yet, like "Schadenfreude" seems to have done, but it should. As soon as I read that definition I flashed back to my days as a Boy Scout when I often experienced it. More so at night, but also in the daytime. Very strange to suddenly have a word for something you know exists but never could fully describe. Doesn't happen very often.
I learned of this word reading about the Positive Lexicography Project, research by psychologist Tim Lomas into useful words that don't translate into English. Browse his website to learn about some other great words English lacks.
Curiously, if you run an Ngram on Waldeinsamkeit this is what you get. Not sure why the curious spike around 1900. But if you look at some of the citations you'll see most of the usage (in English) is in quotations from German. So as I said, we haven't quite "stolen" the word yet. You won't find Waldeinsamkeit in the English dictionaries, but a Google search for "define Waldeinsamkeit" brings up some interesting insights.
No real question here ... just wanted to share a "new" word.
Interesting new word to me.
I played with the Ngrams some and was intrigued by the differences with American English, German and Russian corpora.
Graphs are very different to the extent that there is no data for Russian at all and American English results differs from English.
Uncertain as to what to ascribe those differences to.
I wonder if the English 1900 spike relates to a particular publication of Emerson's Waldeinsamkeit?
[Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). The Complete Works. 1904. Vol. IX. Poems II. May-Day and Other Pieces - Waldeinsamkeit]
I can see that skewing results as he was very popular and extensively quoted and referenced.
The Positive Lexicography Project was also very interesting.
Two interesting articles about the idea of 'untranslatable' words:
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/tag/untranslatable/
cjacobs1066 speculated: I wonder if the English 1900 spike relates to a particular publication of Emerson’s Waldeinsamkeit?
[Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). The Complete Works. 1904. Vol. IX. Poems II. May-Day and Other Pieces – Waldeinsamkeit] I can see that skewing results as he was very popular and extensively quoted and referenced.
That's an excellent insight. You may well be correct. Made me wonder if maybe Walden Pond was named from the word Waldeinsamkeit. So I checked and found this: Walden Pond was presumably named by early colonists after Saffron Walden, England.
And also this guess: Walden Pond could be an abbreviated form of the words "Walled-in."
Obviously, it was not named by Thoreau. And it can't be the other way around: The word "wald" in German means "forest" and "einsamkeit" translates variously to "loneliness" "solitude" "seclusion" "privacy" or "isolation." So I guess that's just a coincidence.
Your first link to the blog by Caroline James was a good read. She makes a convincing case for the idea that no words are untranslatable if one allows for more than a word-for-word substitution. But the phrase "lost in the translation" still applies when it comes to cultural subtleties.
Moderately technical article about translation that includes Waldeinsamkeit.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17439760.2015.1127993?journalCode=rpos20
Towards a positive cross-cultural lexicography: Enriching our emotional landscape through 216 ‘untranslatable’ words pertaining to well-being
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
1 Guest(s)