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As millions head abroad, our correspondents pick out the words that for them speak volumes about the countries they love and live in
One of the many great things about languages worldwide is the sizeable number of words for which there is no real English translation. Often they tell us about concepts and ideas that we are missing out on in the anglophone world.
As the northern hemisphere heads abroad in the coming holiday season, here are a few to be looking out for:
SPAIN: sobremesa
You may have witnessed the ritual, knowingly or not, while on the hunt for a coffee or a cold beer towards the end of another long Spanish afternoon.
Sitting clumped around tables inside restaurants or spilling out on to their terrazas, are friends, families and colleagues, preserved in the post-prandial moment like replete insects in amber.
Lunch and it is more usually lunch than dinner will long since have yielded to the important act of the sobremesa, that languid time when food gives way to hours of talking, drinking and joking. Coffee and digestivoswill have been taken, or perhaps the large gin and tonic that follows a meal rather than precedes it here.
The sobremesais a digestive period that allows for the slow settling of food, gossip, ideas and conversations. It is also a sybaritic time; a recognition that there is more to life than working long hours and that few pleasures are greater than sharing a table and then chatting nonsense for a hefty portion of what remains of the day.
The world may not have been put completely to rights by the end of the sobremesa, but it will seem a calmer, more benign place.
Ask Mariano Rajoy. At the end of May, as it became clear that he was going to be turfed out of office in a no-confidence vote, the then-prime minister did something very Spanish: he and his close circle retreated to a private room in a smart Madrid restaurant. Lunch was followed by a seven-hour sobremesa, and, reportedly, a couple of bottles of whisky.
After all, what does the loss of a premiership matter after a fine meal, a good cigar and some booze-soaked reminiscing? Salud! Sam Jones in Madrid
PORTUGAL: esperto/esperta
It feels almost counterintuitive to have to explain what esperto/esperta means, a Portuguese word without true parallel in the English dictionary.
There are words that come close, that encapsulate something of the spirit of this word and the word itself is spirited. On the ball, quick-witted, with-it, canny, having common sense, intuitive, someone who gets things done: these all help shade in the space occupied by esperto.
I grew up in Portugal and have always felt an undercurrent of admiration, almost affection, for the espertas.
A Brazilian friend, Tatiana, though, warns of a negative sense. Someone esperto can, she says, use his or her instincts to take advantage of others; to trap or fool them into trouble.
Sometimes its easier to understand something by what it is not. Esperta is definitely not slow, dim, unimaginative. If these characteristics were on a spectrum, esperto would be at one end, with plodding at the other.
If you understand it, you probably are. Juliette Jowit
ITALY: bella figura
Before celebrating a confirmation in Sicily last year, my aunt breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that her British niece was dressed appropriately enough so as not to make a bad impression in front of the extended family.
I was also relieved, as it meant I had not inflicted the curse of the brutta figura, which literally translates as bad figure, on my family.
In pretty much all areas of life, whether it be in the way people dress, how they behave, how well their homes are kept or how impeccably a cake is presented and a gift wrapped, Italians strive to achieve the bella figura, or beautiful figure.
Such importance is placed on keeping up appearances and the finer detail that for unwitting foreigners theres a sense of being sized up in everything you do, even going as far as to what you eat and drink and at what time of the day you indulge in such activities.
What matters is not what you do but how you appear, said an Italian friend, likening it to posting the perfect photograph on social media. Its a tactic that enables people to get promoted at work and politicians to win over admirers while giving the impression that they are achieving something.
I call it selfie and spot, the friend said. For example, the politician takes a selfie against a beautiful backdrop, posts it on Facebook with a promise to do something, but then doesnt follow it through. With a good selfie and a good spot, you can survive an entire career without doing anything. Angela Giuffrida in Rome
GERMANY: Feierabend
One of the most misleading, but also most enduring, myths about German culture is that it values hard work over a good siesta. Northern Europeans, the legend goes, have a Protestant work ethic that means they get the job done even if it means staying in the office late into the night, while the southern Europeans wave it off with a maana, maana.
Anyone who sincerely believes that to be the case has never tried to call a German office at one minute past five. When German workers say Ich mach Feierabend(I am calling it a day), it rarely carries an apologetic undertone but usually comes with the confidence of someone claiming an ancient right.
Dating back to the 16th century, the term Feierabend, or celebration evening, used to denote the evening before a public holiday, but has come to refer to the free time between leaving the office and bedtime on any working day.
The key to understanding Feierabendis that it isnt time for going to the cinema or gym, but time for doing nothing. In 1880, the cultural historian Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl described the conceptas an atmosphere of carefree wellbeing, of deep inner reconciliation, of the pure and clear quiet of the evening.
Germanys adherence to the Feierabendrulebook can frustrate when you are trying to make a work call on a Friday afternoon or buy an aspirin from a pharmacy on a Sunday (Sundays being a 24-hour celebration evening).
But as a philosophy, it underpins the proudest achievements of the German labour movement and may just explain why the country has some of the highest productivity levels in Europe: to truly cherish the evening, you make sure you get the job done before five oclock. Philip Oltermann in Berlin
FINLAND: sisu
Sisu is an untranslatable Finnish term that blends resilience, tenacity, persistence, determination, perseverance and sustained, rather than momentary, courage: the psychological strength to ensure that regardless of the cost or the consequences, what has to be done will be done.
It originates from the word sisus, meaning intestines or guts; Daniel Juslenius, author of the first Finnish-language dictionary in 1745, defined sisucunda as the place in the body where strong emotions live. In a harsh environment and with powerful neighbours, it was what a young nation needed.
Sisu is what, in 1939-40, allowed an army of 350,000 Finns to twice fight off Soviet forces three times their number, inflicting losses five times heavier than those they sustained.
More prosaically, it has helped Finns get through a lot of long, lonely, dark and freezing winters, building in the process one of the wealthiest, safest, most stable and best-governed countries in the world. It is not all good, of course. Sisu can lead to stubbornness, a refusal to take advice, an inability to admit weakness, a lack of compassion.
It has become a bit of clich in Finland a brand name for trucks and strongly-flavoured sweets. Research shows it holds little appeal to the young. But ask a Finn to define the national character, and its the word most still reach for. Jon Henley
IRAN: Taarof
Taarofis a Persian word that has no English equivalent, referring to the art of etiquette ubiquitous in everyday Iranian life.
You go first, says Mr A as he meets Mr B at the doorstep, as they try to enter a building. No, its not possible, you go first, Mr B insists in response. Taarof dictates a ritual that may see them both waiting for a couple of unnecessary minutes before one steps forward to enter.
It is an etiquette that is seen almost in all aspects of Iranian life, from hosts insisting on guests taking more food from the table, to the exchanges in the bazaar. How much is this carpet? asks Ms A after choosing her favourite in the shop. Its worthless, you can just take it, responds the seller, quite disingenuously.
Although Ms A in reality cannot take the carpet out of the shop without paying for it, the seller might insist up to three times that she should just do that, until the amount of the price is finally mentioned.
The awkward exchanges may have originated out of politeness; ultimately, they may work to the sellers favour, as the buyer feels a certain obligation to respond to such deference with a purchase, even if the final price is more than she expected.
Another example: you are walking with a friend and you end up doing Taarof, asking him to come to yours for lunch, even though you dont have anything prepared and you dont really want him to accept.
The friend insists out of Taarof that he wouldnt come because he knows youre tired and doesnt want to be a burden, even though deep down he really wants to have lunch at your place.
Oh, dont Taarof, you say in a Taarof asking your friend not to Taarof. He ends up accepting your reluctant Taarof. Youre a bit irked, but youll have to be all smiles. Not all Taarofs are insincere; some are, some arent. Youd Taarof even if you badly want something, saying you dont want it; youd Taarof if you really hate something, pretending you want it. Saeed Kamali Dehghan
RUSSIA: (toska)
Leave it to Russia to serve up the melancholy: toska translates as yearning or ennui. Except it doesnt, because no English word can accurately reflect all the shades of the word, to paraphrase Vladimir Nabokov.
What can toska (pronounced tahs-kah) mean? Spiritual anguish, a deep pining, perhaps the product of nostalgia or love-sickness, toskais depression plus longing, an unbearable feeling that you need to escape but lack the hope or energy to do so.
Visually to me, toska conjures up an endless field of birch on the edge of St Petersburg, in the dead of winter when the clouds never part, and its only light for five hours a day anyway.
Toska is the stuff of great literature. Evgeny Onegin, the foundational Russian novel-in-verse about superfluous men, unrequited love and duels? Loads of toska.
Anton Chekhov wrote an entire short story called Toska about a cabman who recently lost his son and searches for someone to talk to about his grief. He ends up talking to his horse. All that broodiness in the great (and not-so-great) Russian novels? You get the picture.
So why choose toska for this list of positivity? Because if the Russian soul s the place where great emotions reside, then toska pays the rent. Without toska there cannot be delirious happiness, endless heartfelt conversations at 4am at the kitchen table, boundless generosity at obvious personal expense.
Toska is a sign that your emotions go beyond logic and that you are really, truly living your emotions. Perhaps youve felt toska and you didnt realise it, but its a good thing: it means youve got a little bit of the Russian soul in you. Andrew Roth in Moscow
JAPAN: shoganai
As inhabitants of an archipelago that is regularly struck by earthquakes and tsunamis, and as recent events have tragically demonstrated floods and landslides, it is little wonder that the Japanese have a well-developed sense of fatalism. Any verbal reflection on humans powerlessness to control natures most destructive forces often elicit the phrase shoganai.
The expression, meaning, it cant be helped, is Japans catchall response to any situation, large or small, over which people believe they have no influence. A more voguish translation might be it is what it is. A French person would immediately recognise it as a version of cest la vie.
It could be heard, delivered with deep reflection, amid the rubble of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami and, in resigned tones, after Japans agonising exit from the World Cup in Russia.
Shoganai, and its synonymshikata ga nai, are verbal coping mechanisms that apply equally to unwelcome developments in everyday life, from getting struck in a traffic jam to having to spend Friday evening at the office.
With its roots in the Zen Buddhist belief that suffering is a natural part of life, it could perhaps be described as Japans version of the serenity prayer a personal and communal recognition that, on occasion, passive acceptance of an unfortunate truth is far easier than trying to deny it.
But resigning oneself to ones fate with a muttered shoganai has its drawbacks. Some observers of Japanese culture note that it is too often applied in situations in which humans have more influence than they think.
For much of the seven decades since the end of the second world war, there has been a general acceptance of the dominance of the conservative Liberal Democratic party, even among liberal voters. Some have pointed to its role in allowing the rise of Japanese militarism in the first half of the 20th century.
Shikata ga nai is, then, partly to blame for weaknesses at the heart of Japans democracy, allowing one party to dominate even, as is the case today, when it is mired in scandal.
In a country with few energy resources of its own, nuclear power was for decades the beneficiary of the shoganai mindset, one that accepted the construction of dozens of nuclear reactors along the coastline as a necessary evil.
It took Fukushima to prove that Japans lauded sense of fatalism can sometimes be downright dangerous. Justin McCurry in Tokyo
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