Favorite words in a foreign language that don't exist in your native language

[nooj]

Well maybe my other languages are affecting my English because I say a common place all the time and no one questions me about it.

Ea, an interjection typical of Andalucia, used for many, many purposes. I guess it might be compared with the word 'yeah' or even the sound 'mmmmhmmm' in English, although I don't think there is a one to one semantic overlap.

You can see an extended conversation about this word here.

[StringerBell]

According to Wiktionary, there are a few tidy one-word translations in English of the phrase. I would have gone with "urban legend" for il luogo comune but that's not one word.

"il luogo commune" is not an urban legend.

[StringerBell]

In Italian, there is the word, "friabile" which describes the way something (usually a baked good) sort of dissolves in your mouth in a good way, as opposed to being crunchy, dry, chewy, crumbly (it's none of those things)...there's not a great way to explain this in English. When speaking English, I often find myself wanting to refer to something as friabile when I'm trying to describe the texture.

[Chung]

According to Wiktionary, there are a few tidy one-word translations in English of the phrase. I would have gone with "urban legend" for il luogo comune but that's not one word.

"il luogo commune" is not an urban legend.

Something still tells me that luogo comune isn't that unique (let alone un-lexicalized in English).

1. (sociologia) (psicologia) (antropologia) modo di dire semplice e superficiale e dettato dal pregiudizio
2. cosa detta da più persone, anche in un ampio periodo di tempo, talvolta vera oppure inesatta

Sillabazione
luò | go - co | mù | ne

Etimologia / Derivazione
dal francese lieu commun

Sinonimi
stereotipo

Termini correlati
leggenda metropolitana

(Source: luogo comune)

The first meaning indeed overlaps hard with stereotipo "stereotype" as listed under "Sinonimi" while the second meaning of "something said by many people, even over an extended period of time, which is at times true and incorrect at others" shades a lot into "urban legend" to me, let alone "commonplace" or "factoid" (Hell even the Collins English-Italian dictionary translates the term as "commonplace, cliché"). Leggenda metropolitana "urban legend" is shown in the Wiktionary entry as a related term as well. Funny that.

Lastly, the Italian term is just a calque of the French lieu commun "truism; banality" drawn from Latin locus with commūnis ("place/(literary) passage" + "common, ordinary; public").

In Italian, there is the word, "friabile" which describes the way something (usually a baked good) sort of dissolves in your mouth in a good way, as opposed to being crunchy, dry, chewy, crumbly (it's none of those things)...there's not a great way to explain this in English. When speaking English, I often find myself wanting to refer to something as friabile when I'm trying to describe the texture.

It's not lexicalized as in Italian, but "melt in your mouth" comes to mind. Incidentally, Italian friabile is a reflex of Latin friabilis "easily crumbled into pieces, friable" which evolved separately in French as friable "crumbly". The rather infrequently-used English friable is borrowed from the French reflex, and it wouldn't occur to me to use it to describe something edible that falls apart in a pleasant way while chewing it. "Melt in your mouth" (largely) gets the point across without requiring the interlocutor to know Italian.

[StringerBell]

Something still tells me that luogo comune isn't that unique (let alone un-lexicalized in English).

It's not lexicalized as in Italian, but "melt in your mouth" comes to mind.

it wouldn't occur to me to use it to describe something edible that falls apart in a pleasant way while chewing it. "Melt in your mouth" (largely) gets the point across without requiring the interlocutor to know Italian.

No, it is not the same as 'melt in your mouth'.

While there might be certain situations where you'd use that expression in English to describe something that also happens to be friabile, there are many things I would describe as "melt in your mouth" but are not friabile. To understand what exactly friabile is, you'd need to eat a few things that could be described like this to get a feel for it. Explaining it in English is difficult (since we don't have an equivalent term) so the best explanation I can come up with seems similar to "melt in your mouth" but that's due to my difficulty with explaining a texture/mouth feel/consistency for which we don't have a specific word to describe.

***Hey guys, instead of doing your very best to try to prove me wrong that there's some kind of word in English that's the equivalent of the Italian phrase I wrote, how about we all contribute something fun to this thread, which I was hoping would be an enjoyable topic.

I'm quoting myself because at this point I just don't know what else to do to stop comments that complete ignore the point of this thread. The point is NOT to see how many synonyms people can find in an online dictionary which completely miss the mark in terms of being an appropriate equivalent.

I would prefer to delete this thread than spend the next 20 entries defending the validity of word that I like and explaining the finer nuances that differentiate it from the variety of English options you attempt to dig up.

Can you please stop trying to turn this thread into a debate. It is supposed to be a fun thread where we can maybe learn some cool new words and expressions but I already regret starting it.

[DaisyMaisy]

I don't study Japanese, but I saw this somewhere and I've always liked it. This happens to me at work all the time.

Arigata-meiwaku : An act someone does for you that you didn’t want to have them do and tried to avoid having them do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favor, and then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social conventions required you to express gratitude

[renaissancemedici]

Isn't there a german word that means fixing a problem you've created yourself to begin with? I wish we had that. It would describe several political situations perfectly. The words actually used in Greek are not for polite company.

[Querneus]

Ancient Greek θερειλεχής thereilechēs 'good for sleeping under in the summer (said of a tree)'. The word is literally something like summer-sunheat-have-ish.

The English words "to pout" and "to cringe" are words sorely missing in Spanish, too. Best you can do for the former is puso una cara triste (lit. "he/she put/made a sad face"), and for the latter something like me hace sentir disgusto (literally "it makes me feel disgust"), or in the spoken language me da cosa (literally "it gives me a thing"). If you're talking about girls pouting for selfies I guess you'd say sacar los labios (lit. "to bring out the lips").

I imagine there must be a language, somewhere, that has a simple verb meaning "to stick out one's tongue".

[vonPeterhof]

Isn't there a german word that means fixing a problem you've created yourself to begin with?

Don't know about German, but Japanese has a word for starting a problem and then getting the credit for its solution: マッチポンプ (matchi-ponpu). Interestingly, it's a combination of loanwords (the English "match" plus the Dutch "pomp" or pump, implying that you light a fire with a match and then put it out yourself with a water pump), but it appears to be a Japanese coinage rather than a copy of an existing foreign idiom.

[Neurotip]

Fr chez. Ger bei. Cz u. Sw hos. Icel hjá.
I can remember a time I thought this was a special thing French did. Now I know it isn't ... it's a bit like the moment you find out your parents aren't perfect.