“Saudade” Isn't Mysterious
Portuguese doesn’t really get a lot of recognition in North America. If people even remember that it exists, it’s usually filed in the mental category of “that language that’s kinda like Spanish”.
But there’s one word in Portuguese that doesn’t have a counterpart in English or Spanish: saudade, the feeling of missing someone or something.
In North America, this gets a lot of credit for being a particularly poetic or mysterious word for a specific or unusual feeling, akin to the invented word sonder. Here’s the first paragraph of the English Wikipedia page for “saudade”:
Saudade is a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for something or someone that one cares for and/or loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never be had again. It is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places, or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, and well-being, which now trigger the senses and make one experience the pain of separation from those joyous sensations. Saudade describes a feeling both happy and sad, and could be approximated by the English expression ‘bitter sweet’.
That’s a really heavy description. And while I don’t entirely disagree with it, I think it’s overstated. Like I said above, “saudade” is just the feeling of missing someone or something. The catch is that, due to some grammatical quirks, it ends up looking more mysterious than it actually is.