At Making Light, Abi talks about learning Dutch and, as with learning any language, finding new concepts absent in her mother tongue:
But equally strange are the vocabulary items that teach me some concept which has been lurking all my life in the inarticulate space between the English words I know. One such word is anderhalf. Literally, it means “another half”, but it is actually “one and a half”.
These “inarticulate spaces” are what most often trips me up when trying to write an English post about something I’ve only got Dutch sources of. Frex, why doesn’t English have an expression as simple as “er vraagtekens bij zetten“, putting question marks to some explenation offered to you? Or even as simple a concept as “bestuur“, a nebolous group of people who administrate an organisation and where it doesn’t matter who they are exactly? Or something generic like “gemeente“, not quite translateable with city council or municipality or “wijk“, which is not quite a neighbourhood and might be the same as a borough, though I’ve mostly seen that used for New York rather than as a generic term.
And why oh why is it so difficult to get an English translation of hottentottententoonstellingstentjetoegangspashoudercontroleur?