The second is the idea of structuralism, in which every part of the structure of a language is related. Think of it like this: the real world is a plain patch of ground, and language is a net we throw over it. Each time the net falls, every one of the diamond-shaped holes lands on a slightly different patch. The net’s a bit worn out, and some of the holes are torn, meaning they cover more ground. Some bunch up and cover less. Think of words as being like these holes: so saudade might mean something slightly more than homesickness, whereas dépaysement means something less, referring only to that kind of homesickness you get from being in a foreign country. Linguists have called the semantic space words occupy a “lexical field”.

So the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis falls, but the notion of lexical fields makes a lot of sense. In short: no word is completely untranslatable, but then no word is precisely translatable either. And, I promise you, that’s no schnapsidee.

“We have [In English] the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow – whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different, different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow.” So wrote amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in a famous 1940 essay.

This is the untranslatability problem in reverse: “snow” would mean nothing to an Inuit, as its scope is far too large. But check out the Wikipedia page for snow in Inukitut, an Inuit language of Canada. It’s short. The idea that there are tens or hundreds of Inuit words for snow derives from a failure to understand the structure of this group of languages, which are able to fuse adjectives on to a root noun to create a new descriptor. Imagine if in English we wrote softsnow and crustysnow. Would our vocabulary have suddenly expanded?

These examples of “untranslatability” are all wrong or just silly in their various ways. But it’s hard to shake off the feeling that there’s some truth in the idea that speaking a different language makes you see the world slightly differently: as though wearing tinted glasses that lend everything a French or Russian tinge. Two ideas in linguistics are relevant here. The first, called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, holds that language determines what humans are capable of thinking. Since languages vary starkly, so must thought. After lots of study, few linguists now believe that a given language can do more than slightly alter what we pay attention to in a situation, usually through its grammar.