English has roughly thirty emotion words in active daily use. Joy. Sadness. Anger. Fear. Disgust. Love. Pride. Shame. Guilt. Surprise. Trust. Anticipation. Plus the modifiers. Hopeful. Anxious. Frustrated. Curious. The list, when written out, is humbling for a language that has otherwise built an enormous vocabulary for nearly everything else (Shaver, P., et al., 1987, "Emotion Knowledge: Further Exploration of a Prototype Approach," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(6), 1061-1086).
The shortage is not because English-speakers feel less. The shortage is because English organizes emotion as a state, an internal weather. State words are nouns. You have an emotion, the way you have a fever. The grammar pulls in a single direction.
Other languages organize emotion differently. Portuguese registers the relationship between the feeler and the absent thing being felt. Japanese registers the temporality of the feeling, the awareness that it is passing while it is being had. Arabic registers duration, intensity, and direction. Welsh registers the longing for a place that may never have existed. The grammar pulls in different directions. The resulting vocabulary is wider.
This essay walks through ten emotion words from outside English. Each one names a structure of feeling that XPRMTS Series 001 was made to hold. The hex framework that scores every piece across six axes (TENSION, STILLNESS, DECAY, ASCENDANCE, VOID, SUBLIMITY) was built because English's emotion vocabulary could not. Each word below maps to a particular hex signature. The mapping is approximate. The point is that the framework's existence is downstream of the language gap, and these words, scattered across the world's languages, are upstream evidence that the gap is real.
1. Saudade (Portuguese)
The presence of an absence. Saudade is what a Portuguese sailor feels for the sea when on land and for the land when at sea. It is the unbearable beauty of what cannot be returned to. Not nostalgia, which has a specific historical object. Not longing, which has a specific desired object. Saudade has no object that can satisfy it, because the thing being missed is itself a kind of relationship with absence.
The word does not translate. Brazilian Portuguese speakers tend to insist on this. The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote that saudade is the poetry of the fado, and that the fado is the music of the Portuguese soul, and that the Portuguese soul cannot be explained because explanation requires the substitution of words for what is, in saudade, the irreplaceable.
Hex signature: low TENSION (28), high STILLNESS (78), moderate DECAY (52), low ASCENDANCE (35), high VOID (75), moderate SUBLIMITY (65). The piece that holds saudade is mostly empty. The figure, if there is one, looks away. The composition does not promise return.
XPRMTS anchor: XPRMTS.03 SURRENDER. Hex TENSION 65, STILLNESS 55, DECAY 30, ASCENDANCE 80, VOID 50, SUBLIMITY 75. Not a perfect match, but the piece's discovery sentence ("the pause before the next form arrives") sits in saudade's grammar. The next form will arrive. The current form is mourned in advance.
2. Mono no aware (物の哀れ, Japanese)
The pathos of things. The awareness that beauty is fleeting and the feeling that arises from that awareness. Cherry blossoms are the canonical example: their beauty is precisely the fact that they will be gone in a week. To feel mono no aware is to register the impermanence as part of the appreciation, not as a separate sadness layered on top.
The phrase has a long history in Japanese aesthetics, formalized in the eighteenth century by the literary scholar Motoori Norinaga and traced back to the eleventh-century Tale of Genji (Marra, M., The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey, University of Hawaii Press, 2007). English-language translators routinely render it as "the pathos of things" or "the bittersweet awareness of impermanence," but these miss the point. Mono no aware is not bittersweet. It is the structural recognition that the sweetness exists because of the impermanence, not despite it.
Hex signature: moderate TENSION (45), high STILLNESS (82), moderate DECAY (60), moderate ASCENDANCE (55), moderate VOID (52), very high SUBLIMITY (88).
XPRMTS anchor: XPRMTS.01 ARRIVAL. The piece's high ASCENDANCE (95) and SUBLIMITY (90) hold the "lift" of mono no aware. The phase "first contact" suggests the moment of arrival is already passing in the same breath as its appearance.
3. Hiraeth (Welsh)
The longing for a home that you cannot return to, or that perhaps never existed. Hiraeth has saudade's grammar of presence-through-absence, but with an additional dimension: the home may be imaginary. A first-generation Welsh-American feels hiraeth for a country they have never visited. The longing is real. The home is partly invented.
There is no English equivalent and no good substitute. "Homesickness" is too specific. "Nostalgia" too generic. Hiraeth is the structure of feeling that allows a person to grieve a place they have never been (Williams, J., "Hiraeth: The Welsh Word You Need to Know," BBC Travel, 2018). The grief is not for the place. The grief is for the version of yourself that would have lived there.
Hex signature: moderate TENSION (55), high STILLNESS (75), high DECAY (70), low ASCENDANCE (30), high VOID (78), high SUBLIMITY (80). The piece that holds hiraeth is weather-worn, partial, half-remembered. The frame is full of things that are not quite there.
XPRMTS anchor: a future piece, not yet made. Series 001 leans more toward arrival and reckoning than toward longing-for-home. The studio's next series may have to hold this one.
4. Duende (Spanish)
The mysterious force that draws performance into transcendence. Duende is what a flamenco dancer summons that lifts a performance from technically excellent to spiritually obliterating. The poet Federico García Lorca, in his 1933 lecture "Play and Theory of the Duende," argued that duende is not muse and not angel (Lorca, F. G., "Play and Theory of the Duende," translated by Christopher Maurer, in Deep Song and Other Prose, New Directions, 1980). The muse offers external inspiration. The angel offers grace. Duende rises from within and demands the artist confront mortality, blood, the earth. Duende is what makes a piece dangerous to perform.
Hex signature: very high TENSION (90), low STILLNESS (28), high DECAY (65), high ASCENDANCE (82), moderate VOID (48), very high SUBLIMITY (92). The piece that holds duende is on fire. The composition is in motion. The work is risking everything.
XPRMTS anchor: XPRMTS.04 IGNITION. Hex TENSION 92, STILLNESS 25, DECAY 50, ASCENDANCE 85, VOID 40, SUBLIMITY 95. The match is near-exact. IGNITION is duende in print form. The piece does not protect itself. It commits.
5. Ya'aburnee (Arabic, يا أبرني)
"You bury me." The word is a wish: that the speaker will die before the beloved, because life without the beloved is unbearable. It is an emotion encoded as a request. The request is not negotiable. The grammar holds the speaker's love as a function of their own dispensability.
There is no English equivalent because English does not have an emotion word that simultaneously expresses devotion, fear, and prophetic intention in a single utterance. Ya'aburnee compresses all three.
Hex signature: moderate TENSION (62), high STILLNESS (75), moderate DECAY (50), moderate ASCENDANCE (60), high VOID (70), high SUBLIMITY (82). The piece that holds ya'aburnee is small, intimate, and final. It is a portrait of devotion that has already calculated its own ending.
XPRMTS anchor: not in Series 001. This word names a quieter register than the series is built for.
6. Tarab (طرب, Arabic)
Musical ecstasy. The state in which performer and audience are mutually transported by a piece of music to the point of physical and emotional dissolution. Tarab is not pleasure. It is closer to possession. The Arab music critic Ali Jihad Racy describes tarab as an "emotional state of enchantment" that can produce physical responses including weeping, shouting, fainting, and improvisational outbursts from the audience (Racy, A. J., Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of Tarab, Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Tarab is a relational emotion. It cannot be felt alone. It requires the performer to push the piece into the territory where ecstasy becomes available, and it requires the audience to follow them there. The performance and the audience are two halves of the same circuit.
Hex signature: high TENSION (78), low STILLNESS (32), moderate DECAY (45), very high ASCENDANCE (92), low VOID (28), very high SUBLIMITY (95).
XPRMTS anchor: visual art rarely produces tarab because tarab requires real-time performance. But the closest approximation in the series is the experience of standing in front of XPRMTS.05 APOCALYPSE for ten minutes without looking away. The piece does not become tarab. The viewer's nervous system arrives in its neighborhood.
7. Sehnsucht (German)
The yearning for an unknown elsewhere. C.S. Lewis treated sehnsucht as the central organizing experience of his religious thought: the longing that pulls a person toward something that no earthly object can satisfy (Lewis, C. S., Surprised by Joy, Harcourt, 1955). The German romantic poets, including Schiller and the early Goethe, used sehnsucht as a structural emotion of striving toward the unreachable.
Sehnsucht is what a person feels when they hear a piece of music that seems to be remembering something the listener has never experienced, and the listener finds that they too remember it. The memory is for a possibility, not for an event.
Hex signature: moderate TENSION (52), high STILLNESS (78), low DECAY (32), very high ASCENDANCE (90), high VOID (72), very high SUBLIMITY (90).
XPRMTS anchor: XPRMTS.01 ARRIVAL. The piece's hex signature (TENSION 75, STILLNESS 65, ASCENDANCE 95, SUBLIMITY 90) carries sehnsucht's structural lift. The phase "first contact" is sehnsucht's grammar: a reaching toward something that has just begun to be available.
8. Fernweh (German)
The wanderlust for a place you have never been. Sehnsucht's geographic cousin. Where sehnsucht is metaphysical longing, fernweh is concrete: the specific ache for the far-away, intensified by photographs, by maps, by the words of travelers. Fernweh is the opposite of homesickness ("Heimweh"). It is sickness for the not-yet-visited.
Hex signature: moderate TENSION (50), moderate STILLNESS (60), low DECAY (28), high ASCENDANCE (85), high VOID (68), moderate-high SUBLIMITY (78).
9. Wabi-sabi (侘寂, Japanese)
The beauty of impermanence, imperfection, and incompleteness. A wabi-sabi aesthetic celebrates the cracked tea bowl, the asymmetric arrangement, the weathered wooden bench. It rejects the Western valorization of symmetry and finish. The Japanese aesthetic theorist Leonard Koren describes wabi-sabi as "the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" (Koren, L., Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, Imperfect Publishing, 2008).
Wabi-sabi is the only emotion-aesthetic in this list that is also a design philosophy. To live in a wabi-sabi way is to choose objects, rituals, and environments that emphasize the worn, the asymmetric, the partial.
Hex signature: low TENSION (32), high STILLNESS (85), high DECAY (78), moderate ASCENDANCE (45), moderate VOID (60), moderate SUBLIMITY (62).
10. Han (한, Korean)
The accumulated, unresolved grief and longing of a people. Han is national and historical. It is the collective emotion that arises from generations of injustice, oppression, and unrelieved sorrow, and it sits as a kind of substrate in the Korean psyche. Han is not anger and not despair. It is the long sediment of the things that were not made right (Kim, S. R., "Han: The Soul of Korean Literature," The Korean Quarterly, 2017).
Han differs from saudade in that saudade is personal and han is collective. A Korean poet may write from han. A Portuguese poet writes from saudade. The structures are related but not interchangeable.
Hex signature: high TENSION (70), high STILLNESS (72), high DECAY (75), low ASCENDANCE (35), high VOID (72), high SUBLIMITY (82).
What this list is for
Each of these words names a feeling that English has no compact word for. Each word, brought into the conversation about a piece of art, gives the viewer access to a more precise distinction than the English available to them. A buyer who sees XPRMTS.04 IGNITION and feels duende rising in their chest has a better word for the feeling than "intense." A collector who lives with XPRMTS.03 SURRENDER and experiences saudade has a better frame for what the piece is doing than "calm" or "moody."
The hex framework was developed because English's emotion vocabulary could not score what the work actually does. The framework uses numbers instead of words for the same reason these other languages use specialized words: the standard vocabulary is not sufficient.
A buyer who learns to read the hex signature plus one or two of these words is operating with a vocabulary that approaches the precision of the work. The work was made carefully. The reading of the work should be made carefully too.
Read the spec. Feel the duende. Sit with the saudade. Let the piece do its work at the resolution the work was made at.
Selected references
- Shaver, P., et al., 1987. "Emotion Knowledge: Further Exploration of a Prototype Approach." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(6), 1061-1086.
- Marra, M., The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga, University of Hawaii Press, 2007.
- Lorca, F. G., "Play and Theory of the Duende," in Deep Song and Other Prose, New Directions, 1980.
- Racy, A. J., Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of Tarab, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
- Lewis, C. S., Surprised by Joy, Harcourt, 1955.
- Koren, L., Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, Imperfect Publishing, 2008.
- Williams, J., "Hiraeth: The Welsh Word You Need to Know," BBC Travel, 2018.
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