What is love? It depends which language you speak
By Catherine MatacicFalling in love is never easy. But do it in a foreign language, and complications pile up quickly, from your first fumbling attempts at deep expression to the inevitable quarrel to the family visit punctuated by remarks that mean so much more than you realize. Now, a study of two dozen terms related to emotion in nearly 2500 languages suggests those misunderstandings aren’t all in your head. Instead, emotional concepts like love, shame, and anger vary in meaning from culture to culture, even when we translate them into the same words.
“I wish I had thought of this,” says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Northeastern University in Boston. “It’s a very, very well-reasoned, clever approach.”
People have argued about emotions since the ancient Greeks. Aristotle suggested they were essential to virtue. The stoics called them antithetical to reason. And in his “forgotten” masterpiece, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin wrote that they likely had a single origin. He thought every culture the world over shared six basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust.
Since then, psychologists have looked for traces of these emotions in scores of languages. And although one common experiment, which asks participants to identify emotions from photographs of facial expressions, has led to many claims of universality, critics say an overreliance on concepts from Western, industrialized societies dooms such attempts from the start.
To find out how a concept like love varies from language to language, Joshua Conrad Jackson, a Ph.D. student in cultural psychology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, tried a new approach using statistics. He teamed up with Johann-Mattis List, a computational linguist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, who manages the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS). CLICS uses data from field linguists and anthropologists to catalog relationships between concepts and the words that represent them in nearly 3000 languages. Importantly, CLICS can take words that represent more than one concept, like “dull,” and reveal other words that express the same concepts in all languages in the database. That kind of concept mapping was just what Jackson was looking for. “It was a match made in heaven,” he says.
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