A Field Guide to the Missing Words of North America

A Field Guide to the Missing Words of North America

Inuit peoples have 50 words for snow because their survival requires this. Language provides texture, clarity, and differentiation of our experiences. It maps the knowable, and provides containers for our experience. The origin of words also deeply reveals how we see ourselves, our world, and our place in it. But how can you talk with clarity and precision about something that has happened if there are no words for it in your language? Driven by personal necessity, and the awareness that things were happening in his mind and life that the language he grew up speaking did not have the capacity to describe, Natureza Gabriel has spent more than 25 years learning words from different languages and cultures that map aspects of our internal, relational,
and nature experience unnamed in the English language.

Compiled here for the first time in one place is a map of words with power to change your mind and what you see. This book opens a doorway to a new relationship with language, and possibilities of describing, with precision and nuance, aspects of our human experience that haven’t been named in English. Did you know, for example, that there’s a word in Yiddish for a kind of knowing that comes from your guts? That the word for neighbor in Filipino really means an awareness that we are not alone? That in Japan there is a word for the color of sunlight filtered through leaves? That the word for meditation in Hebrew literally means, ‘bring your heart to it.’ That there’s a word in the Indigenous Kumeyaay dialect that means, ‘I see the fire in your heart.’ A Field Guide to the Missing Words of North America opens the door to a new world of meaning.

This is the paperback version of the book.