> "I hadn't considered "yearning", but I ran it by a few of my colleagues and tried to find examples in literature/movies/songs they might be familiar with. Granted, this might be their lack of intimacy with English, but they didn't feel that it quite captured the feeling that тоска is supposed to give. It could also just be them being stubborn, as is occasional to happen."
Thanks for trying. I suspect you may be right about the stubbornness. Competing on depth of feeling is an easy way to create a sense of distinction between us. In a similar way, the Koreans have a word, Han, that they have set out as describing something uniquely Korean, but from what I can see it's a catch-all term for the feelings that come along with oppression. If you want to highlight a deep sense of oppression not felt elsewhere, of course you're going to try to create a sense of uniqueness for your own word describing these things.
Yeah, totally. I'm always open to being wrong on stuff, plus as I struggle to learn Russian it helps to try to understand words better - I can say that business-wise, I've had no need to тоска nor do I anticipate it. Since I'm not good enough at Russian to get into their literature without a dictionary in hand, I can't really find examples of it in literary or poetic works to get a better idea of how it's been used.
Thanks for trying. I suspect you may be right about the stubbornness. Competing on depth of feeling is an easy way to create a sense of distinction between us. In a similar way, the Koreans have a word, Han, that they have set out as describing something uniquely Korean, but from what I can see it's a catch-all term for the feelings that come along with oppression. If you want to highlight a deep sense of oppression not felt elsewhere, of course you're going to try to create a sense of uniqueness for your own word describing these things.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_(cultural)