Meanings get lost in translation. Lambing , for example, doesn't have a direct English equivalent. Endearment is the closest word I can think of, but if you're Filipino, you know that it's more than that. If that were the case, we're missing out on a lot of things. Words, after all, are cultural. An agricultural society in the tropics will have various words for rice—in the Philippines, kanin (cooked rice) , bigas (uncooked rice) , palay (rice that's still with a hull) are some of them. In America, they only use one: rice . The Eskimos, I remember from my Linguistics class, had lots of words for snow when we only have niyebe, one that was only adapted from the Spanish nieve . Snow (or really cold, solid water) isn't important to us—until the advent of Milo-flavored ice drop, that is—but it is to them.