A lexical gap or lacuna is an absence of a word in a particular language. Several types of lexical gaps are possible, such as untranslatability and missing inflections. Untranslatability is a property of a text, or of any utterance, in one language, for which no equivalent text or utterance can be found in another language. ... In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) to reflect grammatical (that is, relational) information, such as gender, tense, number or person. ...

Translatability

Often some concepts lexicalized in one language does not gave the corresponding lexical unit in another language and thus presents a difficulty of translation: circumlocution, a descriptive phrase, must be used instead, or even different phrases in differet situations. If the concept is important, then borrowing from one language to another may happen. The lexical items in a language are both the single words (vocabulary) and sets of words organized into groups, units or chunks. Some examples of lexical items from English are cat, traffic light, take care of, by the way, and dont count your chickens before they hatch. The entire... Periphrasis is a figure of speech where the meaning of a word or phrase is expressed by many or several words. ... A loanword (or loan word) is a word directly taken into one language from another with little or no translation. ...

This case should not be confused with translation into a different type of lexical unit, e.g., a simple word may be translated as a Compound or a collocation. For example, the Russian word "bosoy" is translated as a compound "barefoot" and the English word private (rank) is "soldato semplice" in Italian. A compound is a word (lexeme) that consists of more than one free morpheme. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... A Private is a soldier of the lowest military rank (equivalent to Nato Rank Grades OR-1 to OR-3 depending on the force served in). ...

Missing inflection

Sometimes a certain inflection of a word by produces a word phoneticaly forbidded or awkward in a given language. For example the Russian word 'dno' in the meaning of bottom (of a river) does not have the plural form. Bottom can refer to: In general, the lowermost part (see Wiktionary:Bottom). ... Look up Plural in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Plural is a grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the referent in the real world. ...

See also

• Lacuna model