> German has the word "Fernweh" which means longing for a distant place in the same way that nostalgia means longing for home. No direct English equivalent, yet I was able to express it in English in a few words with no trouble.

With no trouble, or with a single word? In a way you didn't translate the word, you translated the definition, but even apart from mixing up nostalgia and homesickness, it's still far from making the meaing clear IMO. I would describe Fernweh more for longing for not being where you are, wanting to be where it's very different (you wouldn't have Fernweh for an exact clone of your current surroundings no matter how far away it is).. I can't define it well, but I know it's not longing for some specific distant place, and the way you phrased it, it could be understood that way. Some interwebs use "wanderlust" as the English translation for Fernweh, but in German, at least to me, Wanderlust and Fernweh don't mean quite the same thing, though even that would be better than leaving it at "longing for a distant place".

Sure, you can explain every word with hundreds of words if need be, but even then that's not the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k3lOLV0Des

Ich hab Heimweh / Fernweh? / Sehnsucht / Ich weiß nicht, was es ist

Replacing words with elaborate versions of them doesn't have quite the same effect. FWIW I'm saying this as a German who uses English as the primary language for most things that don't outright require German, because it's shorter... I would go crazy programming with German variable names, I would be so busy translating words I wouldn't ever get in the zone. German isn't functionally equivalent there, for me, it's just additional inefficiency and indirection.

And how can you ever know for sure you grok it all, and not just what fits into the toolset you have? I'm not even sure two random people can necessarily meaningfully communicate about the actual depths of their experiences, even if it's in their native language.

> How could the idea come up that humans can communicate with each other through letters! One can think of a person that is far away, or touch a person that is close by, everything else is above the power of humans.

-- Franz Kafka

Nevermind letters and the other technology he was on about there, are even spoken words really that different? How can language achieve what even science can't?

> The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Vita Activa"

> If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say "I love you," the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word "love" is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses.

-- Erich Fromm

Even if you add body language to it, pheromones, so-called shared experiences (you can't share experiences, nothing can occupy the same space at the same time), and so on, I don't think it fundamentally changes. With good friends, people who spend a lot of time in physical vicinity, it quickly approaches something that feels very intimate, where you can communicate a LOT with just a nod or a grunt and actually know how it will be understood. But "a lot" isn't "everything". Simulating "very well" isn't actually "being interchangeable".

I think there is no harm in accepting that. There is a lot of demonstrable harm of confusing symbols and things, on the other hand. That's why, even though as usual I don't really understand what Kafka is talking about (at least I would never be sure I do), I think he is on to something here:

> When you stand before me and look at me, what do you know of the pain in me, and what I do I know of yours. And if I threw myself to the ground before you and cried and told you, what would you know more of me than of hell, if somebody told you that it is hot and terrible. For that reason alone we humans should should face each other so reverend, so thoughtful, so loving as if facing the gates of hell.

-- Franz Kafka