Hiraeth /hɪəraɪ̯θ/
The Welsh word hiraeth has no equivalent in English. It often translates as “homesickness,” but the actual concept is far more complex. It incorporates an aspect of impossibility: the pining for a home, a person, a figure, even a national history that may never have actually existed. To feel hiraeth is to experience a deep sense of incompleteness tinged with longing
Hiraeth. A hopeless longing for all that has been and all that could have been.
I searched for this word for much of my life. I longed for it, I groped for it, I even tried to desperately explain it to a psychologist. "I want to go home but I am already at home" "I am incomplete, I need a place to be but I don't know where that is, I need to be a me but I don't know what that is either"
Nostalgia for a place that never was, for an indeterminate place in your past to which you will never return and besides, you were never there anyway.
You can hear hiraeth in music, you can absorb it through paintings and feel it on clear nights if you stare up to the stars and wonder about everything and nothing all at once. And if you look at your reflection for long enough you can find it there too.Right. in. the. middle. of. your. own. pupils. staring right back at you.
Hiraeth is a long solitary journey to an unknown destination. Hiraeth is the mystery of life, of love and death. It's the hollowness in your heart when all is as it should be and yet there is an air of incompleteness. Hiraeth is a monster of absence. A void which cannot be filled by anything, no matter how desperate your attempts to fill it's greedy,needy,clingy mouth.
The most remarkable aspect about hiraeth is the longing, the desperation that it brings. Hot hot tears and confusion because you are following the right map but you are somehow profoundly lost. It's a feeling so tangible that you feel it, viscerally and heavily. You breath in breath laced with hiraeth and somehow the air is cooler, denser, heavier. You carry hiraeth on your soul.
Hiraeth is laced with 'If'. If only I had, If only I could, what if I'd taken the road not taken? What if.
To have lived so long without the knowledge that there was a word, in my own country's language, that made such beautiful, perfect bittersweet sense is almost laughable. The search for hiraeth, a notion I felt but could not explain, was in itself hiraeth. I laughed and cried with joy and relief when I finally found the label hiraeth. I needed it, finally knowing I wasn't insane, that generations before me had experienced this complex entity and decided to name it.
So, where then does this fit in with linguistic relativity? Can we shove this ethereal creature of a word into the Sapir-Whorf theory?
First I'd better explain the Sapir-Whorf Theory, so keep with me here. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the theory that an individual's thoughts and actions are determined by the language or languages that the individual person speaks. The strong version of the hypothesis states that all human thoughts and actions are bound by the restraints of language. The weak version allows for a bit more flexibility and states that language only somewhat shapes our thinking and behaviour.
Well, I dunno about you but I'm inclined to scream BULLSHIT at the strong version following my experience of hiraeth. I experienced it long before I could name it or linguistically describe it. I certainly would not say that the absence of knowledge about hiraeth rendered me incapable of acting it out. However, I did experience a lot of fear before finding the word to label this insanity as hiraeth. And so, to some extent, the weaker version of the Sapir-Whorf theory holds true, the lack of a word did indeed shape many actions and thoughts.
And so I shall leave you tonight with some quite beautiful and fairly thought provoking passages written by Sapir and Whorf:
"Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation." -Sapir (1958:69)
"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees." -Whorf (1940:213-14)
Now. I'm not always quite this 'thinky', so don't start expecting each post to get so stupidly deep. Here's a picture of a kitten in a hat to thank you for reading.
Admit it, it was worth reading simply to get to this kitten.
Sapir, Edward. 1958. Culture, Language and Personality. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1940. Science and Linguistics. Technology Review (1940) 35: 229-31, 247-8.
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