Abstract
The first types of untranslatable words are, in addition to hapaxes (words that appear only once in a corpus), ambiguous terms and homonyms.
Aristotle, in Book Gamma of his Metaphysics, refutes the Sophists who speak logou kharin, “for the sake of speaking,” by grounding the principle of non-contradiction in univocity: a word must have one and only one meaning, the same for oneself and for others. It is this principle that Jacques Lacan finds “stupid,” for a language, in his view, is nothing more than “the sum total of the ambiguities that its history has allowed to persist within it.” This statement, vehemently anti-Aristotelian, will serve as our guide.