The Language of Love

Love- every language has a word for love. Love is a basic human emotion.

All of the different cultures appeared to feel the same emotional need to express these feelings. We, as human beings needed to be able to talk about our feelings of love. We didn’t want them to remain internal to us, unexpressible. We wanted to share them with others. So, every culture came up with at least one word in order to externally express the internally felt.
For more cultural defintions of love click here

However, there are some emotion related words that do not easily translate- Schadenfreude is one example but there are others. This leads one to question why one culture has a greater desire to talk about an emotion than an other. Are emotions basic to humanity rather than culture? Can you feel something as a German that you aren’t capable of feeling as an English person?
Surely this cannot be the case for Schadenfreude - there are endless re-runs on cable television of people making fools of themselves of home video cameras. There is such a demand for these clips that television companies will pay £250 per clip. This suggests that the feeling of Schadenfreude is not entirely culturally specific. But if such feelings are not then why is the language culturally specific?
In our psychotherapeutic culture surely we should be looking to find terms for all sorts of emotions that we haven’t felt the need to talk about before. Feelings that were too terrible to put into words, or feelings that we’d rather deny we had. It appears we are still using Hermione Grangers strategy of not “naming” -referring to Voldemort as “he who cannot be named”.

The issue of Schadenfreude is discussed further by the maverick philosopher. Click here for the link