Happy Monday! 👋
I hope your week is off to a great start.
Before we get into this email, quick question: have you ever felt a sadness you couldn't quite explain? Not grief. Not homesickness exactly. Just a quiet longing for something you can't put your finger on.
Maybe it's a place you loved. A version of yourself from years ago. Something you're not even sure you ever had.
English doesn't really have a word for it. Portuguese does. And it's one of the most beautiful words in any language.
Language: Portuguese. "Saudade" (saw-DAH-deh)
Meaning: Saudade describes a deep, melancholic longing for something or someone loved and lost, or perhaps never had at all. It's not quite sadness. Not quite nostalgia. It sits somewhere in between, and it often coexists with happiness at the memory of what's missed.
In English, we might say:
"I really miss that."
"I feel nostalgic."
"There's something I'm longing for."
None of those quite get there. Portuguese wraps the whole feeling into one word: Saudade.
Why it's fascinating:
Saudade has been called the defining emotion of Portuguese and Brazilian culture. The entire genre of fado music, one of Portugal's most beloved art forms, is essentially an expression of saudade set to guitar and voice.
The word likely comes from the Latin solitatem, meaning solitude, though some linguists trace it to salute, meaning health or wellbeing. Either way, it has been in Portuguese for over 700 years.
What makes it unique is the emotional complexity it holds. Saudade isn't just about loss. It can be the bittersweet feeling you get hearing a song from your childhood. Missing a city you once lived in. Longing for a future that hasn't happened yet. It even has a name for that last version: saudade do futuro.
In 2007, saudade was listed as one of the most difficult words in any language to translate. Translators often give up and just leave it in Portuguese.
Example:
Tenho saudades de você.
"I feel saudade for you." (I miss you, deeply.)
Yaghan: The Language at the End of the World
At the very southern tip of South America, where the land breaks apart into a maze of islands and channels before dissolving into the Antarctic, the Yaghan people lived for thousands of years.
Their language, also called Yaghan or Yámana, developed in near-total isolation. It evolved to describe a world of extreme weather, coastal hunting, and a landscape unlike almost anywhere else on Earth.
Yaghan is most famous for the word mamihlapinatapai: a look shared between two people who both want the same thing but neither is willing to say so first. It's been called the most succinct word in any language, and it earned a place in the Guinness World Records.
Today, Yaghan has one known fluent speaker. Her name is Cristina Calderon. She is in her nineties, lives on Navarino Island in Chile, and has been working with linguists and educators to document what remains of the language before it is gone.
When Cristina Calderon passes, Yaghan will most likely become extinct. Every word of it, thousands of years of knowledge and culture, will exist only in recordings and written records.
It is, in its own way, the definition of saudade.
The word "salary" comes from salt.
In ancient Rome, soldiers were sometimes paid with an allowance of salt, or given money specifically to buy it. The Latin word was salarium, from sal, meaning salt.
Salt was not a seasoning. It was a preservation technology. Before refrigeration, it was the only reliable way to keep meat from spoiling, which made it genuinely valuable. In parts of Africa and Asia, it was traded as currency for centuries.
The phrase "worth their salt" comes from the same root. To say someone is worth their salt is to say they earn what they're paid. You've been using a 2,000-year-old Roman payroll metaphor your whole life.
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