And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode, I'd like to thank the Lyceum, Aristotle in Renaissance Italy.

If the German language were a person, it would be an army drill sergeant demanding strict about rules and devoted to questionable notions of masculinity.

According to German, tables, chairs, the sky, record players and capitalism are all boys.

But like all languages, it does offer many pleasures.

My favorite German word is glimflich, in part because it's so fun to say.

Glimflich.

It doesn't so much roll off the tongue as do a little dance on the tongue,

then hop out through the mouth and into the world,

making it a better place.

I also like it because it is so hard to translate.

Usually you'll hear it in a context where someone has been fortunate in a bad situation,

like if someone escapes from a car accident unharmed.

Eh is glimflich da fongekon.

Here you'd be hard-pressed to render it with just one word.

This is a phenomenon that will be familiar to anyone who has tried to render philosophical texts from one language into another.

It can be tempting simply to leave tricky words in the original language. So tempting that, in an ancient Greek reading group I used to attend in London, we introduced a rule against having more than one untranslated word per session.

Leonardo Bruni might have rejected even that rule as being too permissive.

When he translated Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics into Latin, he added a preface in which he explained

why it was necessary to replace the medieval version by Robert Grosetest.

This older translation, he complained,

was full of transliterated Greek words that would be incomprehensible

...