The Unspeakableness


an ongoing project by Pei-Ying Lin







"The Unspeakableness" investigates the essence of human emotions. Through experiments of different languages, sounds, body languages, and the subtle elements of emotions, as well as comparing the untranslatable emotion expressions in different languages with English-based researches on human emotions as a stepping stone to discover mysterious qualities of the unspeakableness between human emotions and communications.

The project can be divided into several parts:




Investigation in Emotion Classification




Parrott's Classification of Human Emotions (Click to see full-resolution)




Untranslatable Words in Languages other than English, v.s. Parrott's Classification (Click to see full-resolution)




New emotions invented by the Internet (Click to see full-resolution)




Alternative Ways of Translation


The Untranslatable Words Database (Click to enter)

The Untranslatable Words Database is a collection of videos which people were asked to explain the untranslatable words in their native language with that lanaguage towards people who don't understand the language. It is an attempt to capture the essense of the emotion-related words in different languages through voice, body language, and facial expressions.




Special Thanks

Joana Espirito Santo, Mark McKeague, Koby Barhad, Jaemin Paik, Ai Hasegawa, Alois Bordenave, Bertrand Clerc, Fflur Owen, David Chatting, Yijing Zhang, Ling Xizhu Meng, Magnus Loppe, Anastasia Kirillova, Anastasia Vikhornova, Bilge Nur Saltik, Yosuke Ushigome, Christophe Machet, Tamsin Nagel, Stine Linnemann, Bjorn Veno, Anna Ogden-Smith, Benedikt Gross, Niels van Roij, Iva Minkova, Marie Jacotey-voyatzis, Mathias Vef, Charlotte Brown, David Bellisario, Lina Patsiou, George Little, Sebastian Thielke

Video Credits

Mark McKeague, Koby Barhad, Jaemin Paik, Ai Hasegawa, Alois Bordenave, Bertrand Clerc, Ling Xizhu Meng, Anastasia Vikhornova, Bilge Nur Saltik, Niels van Roij, David Bellisario, Lina Patsiou, Sebastian Thielke