Amusing: French words missing in English
“No language is perfect, and English is no exception. There are always words or expressions that cannot be rendered from one language to another. English supposedly has the largest vocabulary of any languages in the world (7x more words than French !), and well-educated people typically know less than 10% of them. There would be too many English words and nuances that do not exist in other languages (thousands in French, Italian or Japanese), but much less the other way round. Here are examples of the occasional French words that do not have an exact translation in English, or not in a single word.”
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May 17th, 2008 at 9:51 am
Love the idea (I have a friend who is forever looking for long-ass German words for things), but a lot of those entries are really lame and read like they’re written by, oh, a native French speaker who doesn’t quite grasp the English.
For example: lunettes : “glasses”, “eyeglasses”. The English term is particularily confusing when we say things like “replace the glasses of the glasses” (in French rempacer les verres des lunettes). Um, who would ever say that? When I had a problem with my glasses, I went to the eyeglass place to see if they could “replace the lenses of my glasses” (well, technically, I went to see if I could just get a new pair of glasses, but …).