Different takes on the language of love

The English word “love” can be translated as sevgi in Turkish and szerelem in Hungarian, but does the concept carry the same meaning for speakers of all three tongues?

Researchers have used a new tool in comparative linguistics to examine emotional concepts, finding the way we think of things such as anger, fear and joy depends on our language.

Their paper drew on data from nearly 2 500 languages and was published in the journal Science.

To approach the question of how close their meaning really is, the team relied on “colexified” words – when a word has more than one meaning and the meanings are seen by speakers of that language as conceptually similar. For example, the “funny” can mean both humorous and odd, and humour is often found in things that are odd.

The researchers constructed networks of colexified emotional concepts and compared them across languages and language families, finding the words varied greatly in their nuance even if their meaning was equated in translation dictionaries.

“Not every language family seems to see emotion in the same way, and that’s a really important finding,” said Kristen Lindquist, a psychology and neuroscience associate professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and the paper’s senior author.

The analysis found that those language families with similar colexifications were close in geographic proximity, suggesting the variation could be tied to patterns of trade, conquest and migration.

Yet all languages distinguished emotions based on whether they are pleasant or unpleasant and whether they involve low or high levels of arousal.

That supports the idea that primary emotions are hardwired into humans’ brains, which humans have added to over millennia through new experiences that they have gone on to name. –