#26: Ártíð

What is the opposite of a birthday? Not all cultures celebrate birthdays to the same extent that we do in America, but most languages at least have a word or phrase that means "the anniversary of one's birth." However, it is a curious phenomenon that many of those languages do not have a corresponding word to denote the anniversary of one's death. Icelandic, though, does have such a word-- ártíð.

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#16: Að Nenna

We've all had those moments when we just don't feel like doing anything-- rainy days and lazy Sundays when the only thing that sounds appealing is lounging around on the couch and eating our favorite comfort foods. Today's word is perfect for times like this, or days when you're seriously procrastinating on something important, or even when you're just feeling indifferent. It's að nenna, a verb with no precise English equivalent.

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#13: Feðgar

I've already touched on untranslatable words in a previous post, but the truth is that "translatability" as a general concept doesn't really exist at all. At best, translation is merely a form of approximation. It's all about finding the "closest match" to a word in a different language, and when you do that, chances are that some subtle aspect of the original word-- perhaps its connotation, or maybe an extra layer of meaning, or something encoded in the actual sound of the word-- will be lost. This is perhaps best seen in words that describe family relations, like the Icelandic word feðgar.

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#7: Þórðargleði

English is a strange language. Even the most restrictive estimates put our lexicon at over a quarter of a million words, and if one were to add scientific jargon, slang, and dialectal words, that number would skyrocket even further.  Although it's hard to quantify, most experts agree that English has one of the largest sets of vocabulary (and, in all likelihood, the largest) of any language currently spoken. And yet, there are so many things that we don't have a word for, and for these things we are forced to either make use of clumsy phrases or steal outright from other languages. The German Schadenfreude is the most well-known of these stolen "untranslatable" words; it describes pleasure derived from someone else's misery. And while it's a perfectly fine word, German is not the only language to have put a name to this phenomenon. Icelandic has a word for it too, and it's þórðargleði.

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