July 14, 2008
Mamihlapinatapai
A single word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego
It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. Ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other.
— via kottke
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I love examples of such linguistic specificity (though I don’t think I’ve characterized it properly). But it has to do with an aspect of ancient Greek that has long captivated me. Just the other day I was looking up something or other and after I found it I came upon:
Παιδότρωτος, ον, wounded by children, πάθεα π. wounds and death at children’s hands, A. Eu. 496 (lyr). [From the "Big Liddell and Scott". (Oxford at the Clarendon Press. Ninth edition. 1940.)]
The idea of a language allowing of words that contain such notions as “wounded by children”: this enraptures me.
I always just assumed it was a kind of linguistic romanticism that comes from teaching ancient Greek in the Oklahoma heat but my long-ago professor was a wizard with the fluidity of meanings packed into roots and inflections. Maybe it comes with the territory.
My muscles are all atrophied now, but I think I spy pathea up yonder. That ‘wounded by children’ could also carry the weight of empathy, misfortune, accident and grief is truly awesome.
Ashur, my own long-ago professor of ancient Greek was a Hungarian Cistercian emigré who bore an altogether apt name: Father Placid. He had come to the States in the wake of the events of 1956, and decades later he was marvelously patient with big American dolts of nineteen and twenty who were just learning their α, β, and γ.