In response to my previous post entitled "What the F***? Why We Curse", Maya commented:
"'In other words, one part of your brain recalls a word’s meaning, and the other recalls an emotional response or situation associated with that word.' That's really interesting. Do you think we have emotional responses to other words or expressions like 'I love you'?"
Maya brings up a very interesting question and, from personal experience alone, I would argue that there are most definitely emotional responses linked to the phrase "I love you". Continuing along this line of thought, however, leads to several other questions that are more difficult to answer. Is there a difference between definitions of the word "love" culture to culture? If so, does the language used to describe these differences actually affect the way people think about love, and their interactions between loved ones?
In the article I choose this week, IIan Stavans, author of “Love and Language” argues that there are great differences between each culture’s concepts of love.
"Love isn't universal... To the Yanomami of the Amazon jungle, in southern Venezuela and northern Brazil, the concept is absolutely alien. It's not that Yanomami parents and children don't bond, or that friendships aren't forged. It's just that those relationships aren't described with the kind of lexicon we Westerners use to refer to our senses of loyalty and commitment."
Although most of Ilan Stavans' evidence for his claim is very anecdotal, and more research would be necessary in order to prove those claims definitively, the point remains that the concept of love and its handling can vary greatly across culture.
In many other languages, for example, various types of love (mother to child, husband to wife, girlfriend to boyfriend, etc.) are each referred to with distinct words, differentiating linguistically all the sentiments that in English fall are referred to with the single word "love". In Greek, there is "eros", passionate love, "philia", usually love between friends, "agape", divine love, and “storge”, love between family members. Similarly, in Japanese, a boyfriend would rarely say to their girlfriend, "aishiteru", (this I love you is used for a deeper love, usually between married people) but rather "daisuki" (which can mean something along the lines of linking someone a lot, but also means I love you). There is also a word is Japanese, which refers only to maternal love for her children.
Does this separation of concepts of love make each emotion clearer in the mind of the speaker? This question is slightly reminiscent of Professor Boroditsky's study in reference the English blue, and the subcategories within Russian, and their affect on the speaker's perception. Maybe some type of experiment of this type would make for an interesting result.
Critic IIan Stavans on the languages of love:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/21/RV95SGEJ9.DTL&type=politics
Greek Love:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love
Japanese language - talking about love:
http://japanese.about.com/library/weekly/aa021101a.htm
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6 comments:
I think this kind of cultural/linguistic divide is really important for intercultural relationships. For instance, when I get married, I doubt it will be to a non-American woman. That's not to say I'm anti-foreign (especially not against French and Italian girls, rawr), but it's just that people's ideas of how to manage and participate in relationships seem to vary so much between cultures (at least based on my loose experience trying to woo French girls).
Ooh, cool to see my name on your blog!
Actually, it's really funny that you wrote this--I just had a conversation with my RA, who's Chinese, he said that he and his parents never say "I love you" to each other because there's not really a good expression for it. Does anyone know if that's true? I was so surprised!
My grandmother is from Japan and as I was learning Japanese she'd say daisuki as opposed to aishiteru. I was slightly hurt that she only REALLY liked me instead of loved me. It was only when I learned the cultural differences between America and Japan did I appreciate the sentiment. But it is so strange to think that something as universal as love is not so universal after all.
My mother has never in all 18 years of my life said anything remotely close to "I love you" to me =] Actually, I think Vietnamese families rarely tell each other anything like this at all. We very readily say things like "I love her" or "I love my son" to a third person, but we rarely express it directly TO anyone. To this day, I can easily tell my friends I love them, but can never use the Vietnamese word for "love" without feeling awkward. I switch between different perceptions of love when I switch languages, almost.
Really great post and excellent discussion. It's clear that the language and ritual of "love" varies across cultures... Hannah you suggest that psychological research might shed some light on whether these differences reflect something deeper about how language influences conceptual and emotional understanding of love... how might we go about designing a study to get at this issue???
I've read articles about research which, through the use of fMRI, compared the active brain areas of mothers looking at their children's pictures (maternal love) and looking at a spouse (romantic love), highlighting the neurological differences between these two emotions.
Using that research as a fondation, I thought it might be interesting to use the same procedure to compare cross cultures. Experimental groups would consists of Japanese, Greek, Spanish, or English speakers. Each group would be shown a picture of their child, romantic interest, friend, etc. Then through the use of fMRI, comparisons could be made. Possibly Japanese speakers would show a bigger difference between the activated areas in romantic love and maternal love?
The problem with this is that it doesn't prove causality... and there would probably be many different confounds (differences in culture between experimental groups... difference in the way each experimental group was raised...)
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