In Sweden, mangata is the word for the roadlike reflection the moon casts on the water. In Finland there’s a word for the distance reindeer can travel comfortably before taking a break: poronkusema. A terrific German word that people familiar with Concord, Massachusetts, will appreciate is Waldeinsamkeit. What do you think it means? Yep. “A feeling of solitude, being alone in the woods and a connectedness to nature.”
National Public Radio staff say: “Just as good writing demands brevity, so, too, does spoken language. Sentences and phrases get whittled down over time. One result: single words that are packed with meaning, words that are so succinct and detailed in what they connote in one language that they may have no corresponding word in another language.
“Such words aroused the curiosity of the folks at a website called Maptia, which aims to encourage people to tell stories about places.
” ‘We wanted to know how they used their language to tell their stories,’ Maptia co-founder and CEO Dorothy Sanders tells All Things Considered host Robert Siegel.
“So they asked people across the globe to give them examples of words that didn’t translate easily to English.”
I loved this report. You will, too. Read more at NPR, here.
Art: National Public Radio, “All Things Considered”
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
I both heard the NPR report and saw the illustrations you link to–the illustrations I came across on Tumblr. It’s great, the richness of human language and the things we commemorate with special words.
Maptia, though, I hadn’t heard of! What a great concept–will visit the site directly.
I’m always intrigued by the multiplicity of places people come in contact with one story, thanks to the Internet. You connected with the NPR pix at Tumblr. And the eagle video I posted? I learned about it bcs I follow the tweets of a photographer who specializes in N. Korea and he linked to FastCoCreate, which got the video from Reddit, which seems to have picked it up from YouTube. I hope all my readers pass it along from SuzannesMomsBlog.