Nobody's ever been able to explain to me what those concepts are, so I don't believe it.

Family relationships are the first thing that come to my mind.

In Spanish for example, consuegro and consuegra refer to the father and mother of your child's spouse.

The Spanish words succinctly encode that relationship while English requires verbally traversing the family tree.

	▲	amiga386 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinship_terminology and yes, you can categorise languages by the extent of their kinship terminology. You could postulate that a language developed specific words for family and relatives because they prized those specific family structures? Or that language copied another language that did. Similarly, you can categorise languages by how they group numbers, e.g. French is vigesimal while English is decimal.

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4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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john_strinlai 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

its the subject of dozens of listacles.

waldeinsamkeit, saudade, ya’aburnee, etc.

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dofm 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Hiraeth

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drcongo 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That one only works when the homeland is that beautiful.

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dofm 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't know. I mean it's not a longing for just a place, as I understand it. I am not even sure that hiraeth is necessarily longing for the beauty of a place or time. Hiraeth, it seems to me, could equally be a longing for the wordless Welsh expressions of emotion, or for rainy days, or damp, or a time that has passed, depending on where the bearer of the emotion is currently feeling it.

(I am not Welsh, but it has been described to me as an ever tightening elastic emotional rope that is anchored in a place and time that it might not be possible to go back to)

	▲	drcongo 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's an excellent description I think.

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AnimalMuppet 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

OK, here's one: My wife grew up in Latin America. Sometimes, instead of saying "I knocked it over", they say what literally translates to "it fell itself to me". Same idea - it fell - but hey, not my fault, it just happened.

Here's another: "fíjese". It kind of means "you'd never guess what happened". It's like "something that was completely unpredictable and totally outside my control happened, and it negatively affected my ability to do what I was trying to do", except with a lot fewer syllables.

Here's one going the other way: I was talking to a systems engineer about a specific issue, and I said that "we might be able to sweep that under someone else's rug". He was from Russia, and didn't have "sweeping it under the rug" as an idiom, and so didn't know what sweeping it under someone else's rug might mean.

Now, none of these are things that you can't say in another language or culture. You can. They're just a lot more unwieldy to say, and so people express that idea a lot less frequently.