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On first thinking about this I think most people will say you cant do it. On further thinking I believe you can.
Its one of the reasons we have empathy. To understand feelings we have never felt. I have never been raped or tortured, but I can empathise with a person who has. I can have an understanding of what it might be like because of my ability to recall experiences (extreme pain, not being able to get away, feeling violated, feeling helpless etc) to give me an idea of what it is like.
To take this one step further, if I wanted to describe happiness to somebody- and assuming they had all their other emotions and had lived a full normal life- I would use similar feelings to happiness that conjure up the idea of happiness to me.
Being in the warm sun after a cold morning; feeling the rays on your skin just warming you up so you feel good inside. Feeling elated or proud of achieving something; a cross country run, or winning an award for excellence. Sexual intercourse; the intense pleasurable physical feeling you get when you engage in bonding with another.
None of those feelings are happiness themselves- but they can either lead to the feeling of happiness, or give you similar enough feelings of happiness to be useful in describing the emotion itself.
Using these examples is the way I would begin trying to describe hapinness to somebody who has never experienced it. And through trial and error I would continue along those lines.
Wether or not they can understand what I feel is impossible to say. We can never know exactly how any other human feels. But we can talk about our experiences and come to the conclusion that we are experiencing similar feelings.
By this means, I think you could actually give somebody a good idea of an emotion they haven't had before.
"When I was a child I flew! Then as an adult- I watched others soar."
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