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English, a Cold Language? Do we need so many Loves?
A lovely old Italian women, who live next door to me when I lived in Connecticut, told me she had trouble conveying her emotional thoughts in English. She said there were words in Italian that could better describe what she was feeling but English did not have enough words to show her warmth or love.
She was born in Italy, she wasn't Italian-American, as they say.
I also read somewhere that the Greeks have six or seven words for love, describing the differences between, say, the love of your child vs. the love of your parents, vs the love of your lover, etc.
My question is, is the English language cold in the emotional sense, and is that why we only have one word for love, and is that why we may in general have a hard time showing our feelings.
Well, in English, though, you do have the differentiation between "like" and "love", and in informal usage at least here, there is a three-way usage between "like like", "like", and "love", demonstrating the use of reduplication to mark something as what it literally means, as opposed to the figurative or context-dependent usage of something, with "like like" being *less* strong than "like" in that "like like" is used to explicitly exclude non-platonic senses of "like".
Thank you so much for responding, Travis, but I'm at sea as to what it all means - the like, the like, and the love. Can you boil it down a bit more for me? Or maybe expand on it.
"Or maybe expand on it."
love; fondness; liking; inclination (desire); regard, dilection, admiration, fancy.
affection, sympathy, fellow-feeling; tenderness; heart, brotherly love; benevolence; attachment.
yearning, tender passion, amour; gyneolatry; gallantry, passion, flame, devotion, fervor, enthusiasm, transport of love, rapture, enchantment, infatuation, adoration, idolatry.
<<Well, in English, though, you do have the differentiation between "like" and "love", and in informal usage at least here, there is a three-way usage between "like like", "like", and "love", demonstrating the use of reduplication to mark something as what it literally means, as opposed to the figurative or context-dependent usage of something, with "like like" being *less* strong than "like" in that "like like" is used to explicitly exclude non-platonic senses of "like".>>
That's interesting - that reduplicated "like" isn't part of my dialect at all.
"Love" can be used in a very general fashion, but when used in a romantic sense, is very strong and specific, in at least English usage here. "Like" is different from "love" (in that there are various things that one can use "love" for which one cannot use "like" for, such as the love of some sort of relation, be it a love of a child, a parent, a sibling, or loke, but "like" also has a sense referring to sexual attraction with some kind of romantic-type aspect, but which is weaker than the equivalent sense of "love". When I speak of "like like", I am referring to explicitly narrowing the usage of "like" to *exclude* this particular sense of "like", which is often done with the reduplication of "like".
>>That's interesting - that reduplicated "like" isn't part of my dialect at all.<<
Such is just the application of reduplication to the word "like", which is productive in my dialect, and which is used for explicitly removing more accessory senses of given words; this probably arose through the use of a noun as an adjective, or an adjective as an adverb, to describe itself, and then through the generalization of such beyond just nouns and adjectives. One example of another usage of such reduplication is to separate ethnic senses of terms from national senses of the same terms; for example, "Irish" could mean being ethnically Irish in addition to being from Ireland, but "Irish Irish" would only mean someone from Ireland proper.
One note I forgot to mention about such reduplication - at least here, the reduplicated copy of the word, before the second (original) copy, is practically always stressed, and given a higher tone than the second copy, which is not specifically stressed more than any other word.
Travis, I don't grasp all of what you said in your post, but I appreciate you posting it.
But, what does it mean? Is the Englsih language cold? And do we need more words for love? Or, more importantly, do we give a damn about love, for our children, or whatever, to make up those words?
<<One example of another usage of such reduplication is to separate ethnic senses of terms from national senses of the same terms; for example, "Irish" could mean being ethnically Irish in addition to being from Ireland, but "Irish Irish" would only mean someone from Ireland proper.>>
Yeah, reduplication like that is possible in my dialect. For me, "Irish Irish" (with the first element stressed) would likewise mean "actually from Ireland". But for me I think a reduplicated "like", if it occurred at all, *would* convey romantic or sexual connotations, as opposed to the single "like", which would convey the weaker "original" meaning of the word. For example, "Do you *like* like her (romantic), or just like her (non-romantic)?" (Intonation would be very important in a sentence like that.)
<<"Or maybe expand on it."
love; fondness; liking; inclination (desire); regard, dilection, admiration, fancy.
affection, sympathy, fellow-feeling; tenderness; heart, brotherly love; benevolence; attachment.
yearning, tender passion, amour; gyneolatry; gallantry, passion, flame, devotion, fervor, enthusiasm, transport of love, rapture, enchantment, infatuation, adoration, idolatry.>>
<<A lovely old Italian women, who live next door to me when I lived in Connecticut, told me she had trouble conveying her emotional thoughts in English. She said there were words in Italian that could better describe what she was feeling but English did not have enough words to show her warmth or love.>>
I, as a Spanish native speaker, sometimes feel like that Italian woman you mention. We, latins, can be very romantic and lovely people; but also very unpleasant when we get mad. And yes we have in our languages (Spanish, Italian, French, Catalan, Portugues, etc) thousands of ways of expressing our feelings for people. How deeply we love someone can be expressed in so many different ways in Spanish, for instance. The right words always come to our heart, and then we just say it.
In English, as I am not a native-speaker it is difficult for me to express such feelings. However, it's a matter of thinking and imagine I am speaking in my Spanish, then I just express feelings in the best way I can and from the bottom of my heart, as any other Romance-language speaker would try to do.
But let me tell you, people. That NO language in the world has enough words to describe or express love. Describing or trying to define love is like trying to enfold love with words. Love can't be enclosed with words. That is impossible to do, for love is infinite.
(Español, Italiano, Français, Català, Português, and others) are the most beautiful languages in the world, hehehe. If love could be totally expressed with words, it could be done in one of these languages...
Interestingly, for me 'like' is weaker than 'like like'...
>>Yeah, reduplication like that is possible in my dialect. For me, "Irish Irish" (with the first element stressed) would likewise mean "actually from Ireland". But for me I think a reduplicated "like", if it occurred at all, *would* convey romantic or sexual connotations, as opposed to the single "like", which would convey the weaker "original" meaning of the word. For example, "Do you *like* like her (romantic), or just like her (non-romantic)?" (Intonation would be very important in a sentence like that.)<<
The main thing is that reduplication here does not intensify but rather *restricts* the meaning of a word. In the case of what you are speaking of, to just use the romantic/sexual meaning of "like", one would probably use the adverb "really", rather than reduplication. Note that I should have said, though, that when "like like" is used, usually not much of a higher tone is used, unlike the case of, say, "Irish Irish", where a markedly higher tone is used. Actually, if you do use a markedly higher tone with "like like", you could actually probably communicate the sense of it that you are using, which is similar to how using a higher tone with "like" alone can single out the same sense.
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