I think axiom should fit, but according to its official definition, an axiom is a statement that is taken to be true, and as far as I know, a word can’t make an statement by its own.
I think axiom should fit, but according to its official definition, an axiom is a statement that is taken to be true, and as far as I know, a word can’t make an statement by its own.
Axiomatic is pretty good. Irreducible is another. However, I would argue there are no undescribable words. If that were true, no one could learn certain words in other languages
I wonder if anyone has ever said something was indescribable, it was just because they weren’t aware of the word needed to describe it.
Even in a way, saying something was indescribable is doing a lot of heavy lifting by itself, which is weird.
I agree. But thinking in a mathematical way, they talk about defining things in terms of simpler things.
So we could change the question to be “What do you call a word that can’t be defined in terms of simpler words?”
For example. In English, try to define “a”
What about words like “happiness” or “love”?
There are many, MANY words that do not have a 1 to 1 relationship between languages. Love is actually one of the more basic concepts most all languages have a word for.
The areas languages gets really interesting are in the idioms. THOSE are the expressions that generally take many words to explain.
Which is why if you want to write easily translatable text, never use idioms.
As far as I understand, we were not speaking about struggles with translating from one language to another, but about explaining a word within the original language.
German is a great example of having words that mean a whole phrase in English, Schadenfreude (humor at someone’s expense) for one