The reason for this is that the original was created by a culture that had a need to encode the meaning of the word expression in a particular way.'Įmotions are a particular area where cultural understanding can help shape the way in which a word is used - and what it's used to described.

'When the translation occurs, it is frequently the case that the translation is not exact and some sense of the original is lost. 'Often when a word or expression doesn’t have a one-to-one translation into another language, it’s because the original word or expression is culturally bound,' says Jennifer Bloomquist, Ph.D., a professor of linguistics at Gettysburg College. Words for sadness that don't translate into English can often be far more true to the experience of that feeling than what's already available in our language. That's pretty evocative - but it doesn't cover a lot of the emotions of depression itself the isolation, the abyss-like fears. The word 'depression' in English had its own poetic connotations: the word (from Latin deprime) essentially means being forced downward, or a low, sunken place, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

One of the most frustrating feelings about depression is how hard it is to describe.

What is another word for sad