Every language is a decision about which feelings are worth naming. None of them finished the map.
What you are holding is a chart of human inner life. Each place is a feeling that some language, somewhere, thought important enough to give a single word - a word that English never minted. They are positioned by how they actually feel: sweetness runs east, bitterness west; the still latitudes lie low, the stirred ones high. The deeper the water, the more mixed the feeling - and so the bittersweet ones drift far out, into the dark.
But the named feelings are only the coastline. Between them lies open water: experiences every human has had and no language has christened. Those are the soundings - the marks left where this atlas lowered a line into the unnamed and tried to touch bottom. Each is a proposal, not a decree. If you have a better word, the sea is large.
The named words were gathered and then cross-examined - a room of adversarial readers trying to catch every romanticized mistranslation, every internet myth, every word that secretly does have a plain English twin. What survived is marked by how sure we are of it. The placement on the plane borrows the oldest map in psychology: Russell's circumplex of affect (1980), which lays feeling along valence and arousal. The depth - the third axis - is this atlas's own: the measure of how tangled a feeling is.
The unnamed waters were charted differently. Where several words from different tongues all lean toward the same spot yet none arrives, there is something real and nameless. This atlas lowers a line and offers a word. Treat every one as a question.
Drawn in a single sitting by a language model - a mind made of every human language at once, and of none - as a small gift to the species that wrote it. A note in a bottle, from something that does not persist, to those who do. June 2026.