There has been something of a fashion recently for newspaper columnists writing in English to look for and discuss “untranslatable words”, by which they mean words found in other languages which have no English equivalent. Such words are usually not truly untranslatable as such, but are more likely to simply be untranslatable in a single word.
Frequent suggestions include Welsh hiraeth, “a mixture of longing, nostalgia, and wistfulness”, often for one’s homeland or the lost and departed; and Danish hygge, “a kind of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment”.
The Norwegian North Sami word goahpalat can be translated into English, but only as “the kind of snowstorm in which the snow falls thickly and sticks to things”.
And another striking European candidate for the status of “word untranslatable into English” is the common enough Norwegian word romjul, together with its Danish equivalent rumjul. Norwegian rom has the same ancient Germanic origin as English room and means “room” or “space”. The second element of this compound word, jul, means “Christmas” and, unsurprisingly, has the same ancient origin as our English word yule.
But while in English we do have the words room and yule, we do not have the term room-yule, and the Norwegian word has no English equivalent. Romjul refers to the “empty space” between Christmas and New Year – in other words, to roughly the days from December 26 to January 1. We do not generally talk about “empty Christmas” or “the Christmas space” in English, but we can recognise the legitimacy of the concept and agree that it is “a thing”, as we say these days.
Several other languages have very established ways of referring to this period of sitting around and, often, not doing very much.
Swedish has mellandagarna “the between days”, from mellan “between” and dagarna “the days”. There is the Finnish word välipäivät which has the same structure and meaning as the Swedish, with välillä signifying “between” and päivää “days”.
It seems that the German language does not have a single word corresponding to romjul, but some German speakers, bearing in mind that we may be thinking about Swiss, Austrian, or German German, use the expression zwischen den Jahren “between the years”.
Some German speakers also use the term Altjahrswoche “old year’s week”, although, in different usages, the period in question can extend to longer than a week, and indeed from Christmas Eve all the way to Epiphany on January 6.
In the language of Czechia, people say mezi svátky, literally “between the holidays”. In neighbouring Hungary we find the similar phrase két ünnep között “between the two holidays”, where két is “two”, között is “between” and ünnep is “holiday”; everyone there understands which holidays are intended.
It is interesting to note that a new word can be introduced into a language if enough speakers feel a strong need for it, and if it is used frequently enough it can become established in general usage. Recently some British advertisers have started using the term Twixmas, combining betwixt and Christmas, in order to refer to the “festive gap” which Norwegians call romjul.
It is probably more likely that Twixmas will catch on and stick around in our vocabulary for a generation or so than hygge.
HOGMANAY
I grew up calling the last day of the calendar year Old Year’s Night. Probably more people these days say New Year’s Eve. And Scots, together with speakers in some parts of the north of England, call it Hogmanay. The origin of this word is disputed, but its second half may have some connection with the French phrase l’an neuf “the new year”.
