Emotions that can’t be expressed in English | Infographic by Pei-Ying Lin

I thought this was pretty cool — an infographic showing a spectrum of common emotions, with emotions that can’t be communicated directly in English slotted in amongst them. Click the image to see a full-size version.

Languages develop alongside cultures, shaped by the way that people think and what they think about. When you consider the differences in philosophy, religion and habit across the world, it’s not that surprising that people think in terms of emotions that native English speakers have never even come across.

Of course all of these emotions can be estimated using a mixture of emotions that English speakers do know — that’s how the creator of the infographic describes them in English. But you know that there are subtleties that can’t be comprehended until you’ve immersed yourself in the language and the culture that formed beside it.

Untranslatable Words in Languages other than English, v.s. Parrott’s Classification by Pei-Ying Lin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.