I have written before about how impoverished our vocabulary for love is, and so I found this post on Facebook by Ajam Media Collective absolutely fascinating:
Barry’s BlueSky- Untitled April 24, 2024And there's a written version! https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/24/zionism-seder-protest-new-york-gaza-israel [contains quote post or other embedded content]
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- Untitled April 24, 2024The Leader of All Manhood has issued his ruling: It's gay for men to love sex with women. Guys: If you hate sex with women, you can do it and be straight. But if you love sex with women, that's gay. If you want to be straight, fuck men instead. Sorry, but that's the rule.
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I don’t think “impoverished” is accurate; it’s just that English tends towards multi-word explanations for certain types of things.
Schadenfreude is not a concept alien to English, nor one which can’t easily be expressed. Neither are those Arabic terms for love. We just prefer to say “love in which you lose yourself,” or any one of 100,000 variations of it.
There are certainly things where our language IS “impoverished.” Those mostly stem from a failure of English speakers to distinguish between details; you need a very in-depth understanding of snow and ice to come up with a vocabulary specific to describing it. But we experience and discuss love just like anyone else–we just use more words.
I’m not a native speaker, but…
Longing, affection, infatuation, passion, desire, lust, friendship, camaraderie, yearning, attachment, dependency… I think these are about as much ‘love’ as some of the words listed in the original post.
My Persian friend says that at least two of the words above have completely different meanings in everyday conversation, and are only used as love in over the top poetic speech… so lets add sunshine, snow, and light to the English words for love, should we?
I understand that some Arab ‘scholars’ can claim with a straight face that Arabic has over half a billion words, compared to ‘impoverished’ languages like French and English. Should this kind of propaganda find a forum here, as well?
I’m not a native speaker, but…
Longing, affection, infatuation, passion, desire, lust, friendship, camaraderie, yearning, attachment, dependency… I think these are about as much ‘love’ as some of the words listed in the original post.
My Persian friend says that at least two of the words above have completely different meanings in everyday conversation, and are only used as love in over the top poetic speech… so lets add sunshine, snow, and light to the English words for love, should we?
I understand that some Arab ‘scholars’ can claim with a straight face that Arabic has over half a billion words, compared to ‘impoverished’ languages like French and English. Should this kind of propaganda find a forum here, as well?
*sigh*
Every time I post from this employer of mine, my first post get eaten. The IT guy (whom I personally know) claims the PC is completely clean, but your site does not like it.
By the way, Schadenfreude is a constructed word. Pleasure from Damage.
First, I realize that I forgot to link to the post in which I wrote about what I called our impoverished vocabulary for love. (I will add it to the post as well.) I did not mean by “impoverished” a simple comparison between the number of words for different kinds of love in English versus any other language, in this case Arabic. Nonetheless, in the context of what I wrote in that other post, I found this list of Arabic words, as I said, fascinating.
Second, though, and I suppose more substantively, when a culture has a word for something, that something has a resonance, a presence, an identity within the culture in a way that it would not have in the absence of that word. Similarly, to name something is to give it a reality, make it comprehensible, accessible in a way that it was not before it was named—before it became a “thing.” This does not mean, as the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states, that I think “language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories,” but I do think that the weak version—”linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behavior”—does have relevance here.
Do English speakers feel—or, are we capable of feeling—all the different emotional states signified in this list? Of course. Can we find ways of expressing those feelings in English? Of course. But we have not given them names; we do not make the fine—and perhaps not so fine—distinctions between them that are implied simply by the fact that they have names; and I would suggest that, because they don’t have names, we experience those feelings differently; we give them different kinds of meaning, respond to them differently, and so on.
While Sebastian is right that the claims of the Arabic scholars he refers to are ridiculous, that doesn’t mean the differences I am referring to aren’t significant. If they weren’t, I don’t think you would see the kind of linguistic borrowing that results in previously foreign, untranslatable words becoming incorporated into a “host” language. (Sebastian, I would be curious to see any links; not because I don’t believe you—there used to be plenty of essentialist arguments about the superiority of English to go around—but because I am curious.)
I know nothing about Arabic, but if there are two languages – one of which had lots of specific technical words and one which has a few broader more fluid and ambiguous ones – I would not neccesarily say the first one is richer. Having very specific words can cut down the range of meaning that can be expressed.
I also don’t agree with your cultural universalism. If you take the view that romantic love is a western invention (which isn’t to say it’s healthy), and I do, then it is just so ingrained in our culture and emotional lives and concept of love than I just don’t see how we can jetison that and know what other people experience. I can sort of see what 1, 4, and 5 are getting at, but I have no idea about what 2, 3, or 6 mean.
Links? About the facts that words on your list mean ‘love’ the way that ‘sunshine’ does in English? The PC I’m on is not mine, I cannot enable an Arabic keyboard… you are probably better equipped to translate them.
If you mean links about the half billion words in Arabic? I have seen an interview clip from Saudi TV (probably Alarabiya) in which a minister (government, not church) was comparing English to Arabic, claiming one had less than 20 million words and the other more than half a billion. A quick Google shows that the minister name was “Dr. Adnan”, I think he’s the one for Islamic affairs. This should be enough to get you started.
By the way, I’m with gin-and-whiskey on the fact that languages are different, and some facilitate and accept the formation of new words while other encourage using phrases to describe concepts. And in the middle, you have Germans, who take phrases, and claim they are words. Last time I was in Germany I got myself some Kaftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung… and you cannot convince me people in the US do not think about “motor vehicle liability insurance”.
And anyway, didn’t we already have this discussion about snow and camels, a few years ago?
“Last time I was in Germany I got myself some Kaftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung… and you cannot convince me people in the US do not think about “motor vehicle liability insurance”.”
———–
The word is “Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherug (!).
My experience is that to get a feel for a foreign language you have to live in the country for at least 10 years or be born to bilingual parents or the like. Otherwise, there’s just lots of bullshit flying around with regard to what words mean etc.
I thought schadenfreude meant shameful joy, sebastian.
I thought schadenfreude meant shameful joy, sebastian.
Oh. In French, it is used to express “Enjoying the misfortune of others.” I always thought that our usage matched what I understood the German construct to mean “Pleasure (derived from) Damage (suffered by others)”
I have always used it to mean the same in English… As our meaning is a subset of yours, I can at least hope that I have not sounded too much the fool.
@Sebastian: You were right. In English, “Schaudenfreude” means exactly the same thing as the German word.
I learned something today! Whew, almost 11 pm, cutting it a little close.