Wednesday 19 January 2022

how many meanings are there to 'love'?

What do you mean when you say you love your brother/mother/husband/friends, or you love chocolate/the Beatles/flying/this blog?

Words have lots of meanings - for example the word 'love' - as explored by Dr Tim Lomas BBC Radio 4:

The Death of Nuance - Twisting My Words - BBC Sounds

He has a book out looking at the problem:

Have you ever had a feeling that you couldn't quite describe, because no English word exists for it?

The Happiness Dictionary: Words from Around the World to Help Us Lead a Richer Life eBook : Lomas, Tim: Amazon.co.uk: Books

Here he is giving a TED Talk on so-called 'untranslatable words':

Tim Lomas: Expanding our experiential horizons through untranslatable words | TED Talk

Expanding our experiential horizons through untranslatable words | Tim Lomas | TEDxZurich - YouTube

He has a 'positive lexicography' where he looks at this in detail:

Welcome to the positive lexicography, an evolving index of 'untranslatable' words related to wellbeing from across the world's languages. For an introduction to the project, please check out my new TEDx presentation.

drtimlomas/lexicography

Click on the example of 'love' in the top-left hand corner to see a wealth of language:

Lexicography

And here he has an article where he explores

... love is far more complex. Indeed, arguably no word covers a wider range of feelings and experiences than love.
So how can we ever define what love really is? In my new study, published in the Journal for the Theory of Social Analysis, I’ve made a start by searching the world’s languages for words relating to love that don’t exist in English...

How I discovered there are (at least) 14 different kinds of love by analysing the world's languages

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