In some languages, love and pity get rolled into the same word
Lexically speaking, love is love. Except when it’s not. In some languages, the word for love comes tinged with pity. By analyzing the meanings of words used to describe emotions in over 2,000 languages, researchers found some universal truths. But the analysis, described in the Dec. 20 Science, also revealed cultural quirks. That includes “hanisi,” which, in the Rotuman language spoken just north of Fiji, refers to both love and pity. Figuring out how people label their emotions with words may give clues about how different cultures experience the world (SN: 9/10/19). Along with colleagues, psychologists Joshua Conrad Jackson and Kristen Lindquist of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studied emotion words from 2,474 languages spanning 20 major language families. The researchers looked for words that were used to describe similar concepts (“water” and “sea,” for instance, but not “water” and “sun”). Among emotion words, an overall structure emerged. Generally, words used to communicate good and bad feelings were distinct from each...