At the risk of irritating this Board again, I'm quoting a phrase, which I assume to be wrong, that's in the book I am reading (Kidd's "The Secret of the Bees"):

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Did you know there are thirty-two names for love in one of the Eskimo languages?" August said. "And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving a Coke with peanuts. Isn't that a shame we don't have more ways to say it?"

I checked the thesaurus for words for love, used as a verb, and they include, admire, cherish, esteem, exalt, fancy, glorify, idolize, prefer, prize, treasure, venerate. None of those do it for me when it comes to loving my family...but I could fancy a Coke, so maybe that's the difference. Thoughts on this?

My thoughts?
Gotta love those snowclones.
Or possibly admire, cherish, esteem etc them.

Kalleh, I assume that book is a novel?

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Kalleh, I assume that book is a novel?

It is a novel. However, often novels have facts...or misinformation meant to be facts. I assume this is the latter, but I'll do a little homework to see. I thought maybe people here had heard of this, as they had about the snow words.

This is probably not worth the time it would take to prove it. Since she said "Eskimo languages," one would have to check all of them, and there are many, according to Wikipedia. Plus, the online translators only seem to have Inuit, at the most.

However, I did find this site interesting, though since it touts the "Inuit has 30 words for snow" idea, I realize it's a bunch of balderdash. Sanskrit has ninety six words for love and English has one?

Let's say you could count the dialects and languages of "Eskimo".

Let's say you could count the number of words in language X that mean Y (in language Z). And vice versa.

What is it supposed to mean?

On another words-related board, somebody mentioned that the MacDonald's motto "I'm loving it" has been translated into Tagalog as "Love ko 'to". Why is an English word used instead of the native one? A friend I know (who was raised in the Philippines and speaks Tagalog had this to say: "Taglish is the lingua franca in the Philippines, so absolutely not suprising they would choose "love" versus "mahal" or "iniiibig" or "gusto" -- it just scans better. Also, "mahal" and "iniibig" have more serious connotations -- as in, romantic love. The English "love" is lighter in connotation." So, when people go lexicon diving and messing about with languages they know only in passing, I wonder if they even know what they're asserting. How many of the people saying that Eskimo has X number of words for Y can even say something in an Inuit language, let alone even meat a person who can.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd,

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Originally posted by Kalleh:
Sanskrit has ninety six words for love and English has one?

Of course English has a lot of words for love. I looked up some of those Sanskrit words in Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Of course they all have different shades of meaning, just like the many English words for love do. aṅgaja is "intoxicating passion", ujjvala is "passion", aspanda is "unvariable (as love)", kāma is "wish, desire, longing; love, affection, object of desire or of love or of pleasure", kānti is "beauty enhanced by love". Many of the words are just different names for the god of love.

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If we had a vocabulary of thirty words for love ... we would immediately be richer and more intelligent in this human element so close to our heart.

English has a lot of words to describe horses, but that doesn't automatically mean I know a lot about horses.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

Ah, well, I suppose I shouldn't have brought it up again.

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Originally posted by Kalleh:
Ah, well, I suppose I shouldn't have brought it up again.

Why? I'm not upset, and I hope I didn't upset anyone.

Since the subject has been brought up again ...

Aren't a lot of such languages agglutinative? That is, they use compound words to describe something precisely. For example, where we'd talk about "freshly-fallen snow" (two or three words depending how you count) their word would be "freshlyfallensnow" (all one word). Ergo, they have more words relating to snow, but all relating to different types, which are described in English by the use of adverbs, adjectives, etc as separate words to the main noun.

Here's the explanation again.

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That does not mean there are huge numbers of unrelated basic terms for huge numbers of finely differentiated snow types. It means that the notion of fixing a number of snow words, or even a definition of what a word for snow would be, is meaningless for these languages. You could write down not just thousands but millions of words built from roots that refer to snow if you had the time. But they would all be derivatives of a fairly small number of roots. And you could write down just as many derivatives of any other root: fish, or coffee, or excrement.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

Isn't that basically what I just said (in less technical language)?

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Originally posted by arnie:
Isn't that basically what I just said (in less technical language)?

Basically. I thought about saying so earlier but I didn't have time. You could argue that Eskimo languages have more words for everything because they are agglutinating languages. This is if we define an Eskimo word as "base plus affixes", which often translates into English as a sentence. You can't really compare words across English and Eskimo languages.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

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Why? I'm not upset, and I hope I didn't upset anyone.

Oh, no, not at all, goofy. I can't imagine you upsetting anyone, particularly me. I just realized that we'd gone over this before and perhaps I should have left the subject alone.