20 more awesomely untranslatable words from around the world If only you could use these words in Scrabble. Photo: Jeremy Mates When linguists refer to “untranslatable” words, the idea is not that a word cannot somehow be explained in another language, but that part of the essence of the word is lost as it crosses from one language to another. In the novel Shame, Salman Rushdie’s narrator suggests: “To unlock a society, look at its untranslatable words.” Here are 20 words that don’t translate directly into English; what may these words tell us about the societies in which they come from? 1. Arabic – [in-shal-la] While it can be translated literally as “if Allah wills,” the meaning of this phrase differs depending on the speaker’s tone of voice. It can be a genuine sentiment, such as when talking to an old friend and parting with “We’ll meet again, inshallah,” or it can be used as a way to tacitly imply you actually aren’t planning to do something. Photo: Shahram Sharif 2. 3. 4. 5. Photo: Ethan Prater 6. 7. 8. 9. A sample from The Joys of Yiddish: 10.
Articles :: The 99 Percent The author of The 4-Hour Chef on how he markets his work while keeping focused with the help of timers, old laptops, and an avoidance of public speaking. read more → Build a community of fans and customers before you release your work to dramatically increase your chances of success and be lightyears ahead of your peers. read more → After studying how children best succeed, author and journalist Paul Tough determined the character traits that most often lead to happy adult lives. read more → Do you have a "dream project" or career that you consistently neglect? read more → Entrepreneurs make their own luck, and so should we, according to the new, break-out bestseller The Start Up of You. read more → Shopping for that brainy special someone? read more → Ten thought-provoking quotes on decision-making, daydreaming, and making a difference from Michael Bungay Stanier's fantastic new book, End Malaria. read more → The ego is the enemy of innovation. read more →
Solar System Scope The Top 10 Relationship Words That Aren't Translatable Into English | Marriage 3.0 Here are my top ten words, compiled from online collections, to describe love, desire and relationships that have no real English translation, but that capture subtle realities that even we English speakers have felt once or twice. As I came across these words I’d have the occasional epiphany: “Oh yeah! That’s what I was feeling...” Mamihlapinatapei (Yagan, an indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego): The wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start. Oh yes, this is an exquisite word, compressing a thrilling and scary relationship moment. Yuanfen (Chinese): A relationship by fate or destiny. From what I glean, in common usage yuanfen means the "binding force" that links two people together in any relationship. But interestingly, “fate” isn’t the same thing as “destiny.” Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese): The act of tenderly running your fingers through someone's hair. Ya’aburnee (Arabic): “You bury me.”
— Scobleizer I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world. So, over the past few months I’ve been talking to tons of entrepreneurs about the tools that curators actually need and I’ve identified seven things. But NONE of the real time tools/systems like Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, give curators the tools that they need to do their work efficiently. As you read these things they were ordered (curated) in this order for a reason. This is a guide for how we can build “info molecules” that have a lot more value than the atomic world we live in now. Thousands of these atoms flow across our screens in tools like Seesmic, Google Reader, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Simply Tweet, Twitroid, etc. A curator is an information chemist. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 1. 1.
Dead Media Archive Listen and Write - Dictation - How We Will Read: Maria Popova This post is part of “How We Will Read,” an interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. Read our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here. And check out our new homepage, a captivating new way to explore Findings. This week we were extraordinarily lucky to get some of the precious time of Maria Popova, the Internet’s most awesome curator. Maria is best known for her site Brainpickings, in which she and her co-curators find the most interesting stuff on the web, consistently — typically, what is the most beautiful, inspiring, and poignant. How do you do most of your reading and annotating these days? I prefer digital — Kindle on iPad is my weapon of choice. That said, I read a lot of old books, most of which are not available on Kindle. Because I’m a writer as much as a reader, I often take notes with the awareness that I’ll be writing about what I’m reading. How has reading become more social for you? It hasn’t.
30 Extremely Elegant Serif Fonts 939 shares 10 Best New Free Fonts We’ve been on the prowl for some new free fonts to share with you. After much searching, we found quite a few, but we believe in “only the best” for WDL readers. The fonts we’ve rounded up for this post are absolutely beautiful, and we know that they’ll find a home in many or your… Read More 1138 shares 9 Free & Useful Fonts for your Designs Whether it’s PSD’s or icons, we love finding high quality free files and sharing them with our readers. The Meanings Behind Words for Emotions Aren't Universal, Study Finds | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine In May 1993, Trinidadian-German Eurodance artist Haddaway posed a crucial query to the world: “What is love?” Haddaway asked his question in English, but he received a range of responses—in part, perhaps, because there were so many other languages listeners could use to answer. By analyzing words from nearly 2,500 languages, researchers have found that terms describing emotions—like anger and happiness—can have very different meanings depending on the cultures and geographies where they originate. “We walk around assuming that everyone else’s experience is the same as ours because we name it with the same word, and this suggests that that might not be the case,” study author Kristen Lindquist, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tells Amina Khan of the Los Angeles Times. By mapping out colexification in emotional terms, the team was able to identify feelings speakers of a given language considered similar.
The 90 Year Evolution of Movie Posters Since the inception of cinema, movie posters have been used to promote films and create buzz. Just as the style of cinema has evolved, the design style of these promotional posters has changed. Poster printing was also a hard thing to get over in the early 1900s, the prices for the promotion images were high and not always easily printed. The 1920s The 1920s was known for movie posters that employed fairly traditional type for the time and hand-drawn illustrations over stills that depicted scenes from the movie. 1930s In the 1930s, we see a shift towards bolder typographic designs with a growing tendency towards illustrations focusing on main characters of the film, particularly faces, over depictions of scenes. 1940s By the 1940s, we rarely see scene depictions anymore. 1950s 1960s 60s posters don’t go as far as getting rid of illustrations altogether, but type plays a more important role in the layouts. 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s Conclusion Need a poster design?
Brickstarter We Have a New Shortest Science Paper. It Also Has No Words, and Is Utterly Brilliant. To most laypeople, a scientific paper is a wordy jumble of jargon, the abstruse monotony occasionally punctured with a confusing chart, and maybe a table or two brimming with numbers. Many scientists recognize that this perception is at least partly deserved, and do their best to communicate their work clearly, correctly and as briefly as possible. To salute their efforts, last year, we drew attention to the shortest scientific paper ever published. Now, we can report that there is actually a tie for the distinction of "shortest scientific paper." "On nonrecoverable deletion in syntax," published in 1972 to the journal Linguistic Inquiry, also had no words, and -- in its own fashion -- was equally brilliant. Then, in 1972, Linguistic Inquiry published the Fall issue of its 3rd volume, and on page 528 was a paper called "On nonrecoverable deletion in syntax" by Robert Fiengo and Howard Lasnik on exactly this topic. (Image: John T.
The 7 most iconic film-stills in movie history Back in the day, these photos had an important role of summing up the films narrative and key characters and enticing people into seeing the film. With the arrival of the digital age, HD screen grabs and a plethora of social media, the film-still doesn’t quite have the same importance today. But it still has an influence and many artist-photographers have used the aesthetic of the genre as the cornerstone of their work. With so many fabulous films produced, there’s literally millions of photos to choose from. However, in true Nokia Connects style, we’ve gone out on a limb and chosen seven we think are the most iconic ever. Possibly not the most famous in Hollywood, but surely the most famous ! The film may have been riddled with criticism for Kubrick’s treatment of Shelley Duvall, but Jack Nicholson’s performance and his door splitting entrance at the films crescendo is one of cinema’s most well known climaxes. Another film mired in controversy.