How to Say “I Love You” When the Language Doesn’t Exist | Hacker News Reader

How to Say “I Love You” When the Language Doesn’t Exist

catapult.co

60 pointsThevet46 comments

> The phrase most directly means “(I) am loving (you),” as if to convey that love is an active labor, not just an amorphous feeling tossed between two parties.

I really connect with this.

In the west, love seems to be this thing you cannot control. It can come upon you suddenly and leave you just as suddenly. In that context, "love" is a scary thing. It seems to have a mind of it's own. Truly, I don't believe that it's love at all, but usually either lust or infatuation in disguise.

I believe whole heartedly that "love" is always an act. You can say you "love" someone while actively doing things that prove you do not love them. Likewise, you can actively show someone love without saying anything to them. True love is a controlled action and is accompanied by feelings (at least at times), but it does not have to be.

Perhaps the Japanese got this completely right.

> Perhaps the Japanese got this completely right.

You can't just say that and then not elaborate :)

Edit: Oops, didn't read the article.

Gp was probably assuming an audience who had read the article.

From the article:

In Japanese, the phrase “I love you” exists linguistically, but does not exist culturally. Linguistically, it is best translated as 愛してる or Aishiteru. Unlike English, it does not contain the “I” and “you” involved in “I love you”; instead, the “I” is implicit, belonging to the speaker only in assumption, as is the “you.” The phrase most directly means “(I) am loving (you),” as if to convey that love is an active labor, not just an amorphous feeling tossed between two parties.

In English, we have a lot of confusion because the word love is both a very and a noun. The verb describes acting in a deeply caring fashion. The noun describe a feeling.

This is why we can have song lines like "Are you going to stay with the one who loves you? Or are you going back to the one you love?"

Very often, when someone says "I love you" they mean "I have strong feelings because you are good to me." They don't necessarily mean "So I intend to be good to you."

It's often a pretty parasitic pronouncement.

/cynic

I can disprove that with a counterexample. I love my wife. It's a feeling I have within my chest, but it's not infatuation which fades after a few months. It really is an amorphous feeling that's deeply rooted.

And yes that might make it scary, but that's the reality.

> In the west

The people in this very discussion pointing out differences and difficulties translating between English and French, Spanish, and (Ancient) Greek should disabuse one of the notion that this is some "Western" thing.

Russian is the same way.

You can translate "I love you" linguistically, but it doesn't really make sense to say - people express it through actions rather than words. It's definitely an interesting (and rather significant) difference in Western culture that grants the 3 words such importance.

What do you mean? It absolutely makes sense to say (я тебя люблю). People tend to say it less frequently because the communists attempted to eradicate display of superfluous emotions by pretending they don't exist, but if you go back to the classics the characters talk about love all the time.

I didn't mean it didn't make sense grammatically, just that it's not really something people use in the way they do here in the U.S.

Anecdotal, but growing up surrounded by Russians and consuming Russian media daily, "я тебя люблю" as a phrase is something I've heard uttered by others maybe a dozen times, ever, compared to American culture where it's omnipresent and not uncommon to use many times a day.

Movies and books do talk about love, of course, Russian poetry especially expresses love in a truly amazing way. But the article is referring to the frequent conversational use and Western importance of "I love you", and in that sense, there's a major cultural difference. Didn't know about the historical context behind it - that's an interesting point.

Poor article - of course it exists. The right answer is at the end, you say 大好き usually in Japanese, nobody uses 愛してる, its too formal and not commonly used.

and usually the proper way to say it is X　のことが好きです which is difficult to translate but it's a subtle nuance referring to the substance of the person instead of just the person.

I wonder if Google's Pixel Buds will ever accidentally trigger a romance.

のことが好きです == "I like that":

https://translate.google.com/#ja/en/%E3%81%AE%E3%81%93%E3%81...

This would make for a rather unlikely, but interesting, meet-cute.

The parent comment just left out the 大 (big/great) from the sentence example

好き - like

大好き - love (lit. "great fondness")

You dont need dai- to declare your love in Japanese, unless you are an immature teenager.

interesting I deleted two characters off

https://translate.google.com/#ja/en/%E3%81%AE%E3%81%93%E3%81...

and it translates as I love you :) no idea how it would come across in japanese

This is just google trying to make sense of nonsense Japanese; the Xのこと is something like 'X's characteristics' (sounds really stiff, but that's how i'd concisely explain it) so のごとが好きです is like "i like 's characteristics" and is semantically meaningless.

I think what the article addresses is the literal translation for "I love you" in Japanese, not the idiomatic translation.

Literal translation cannot make any sense between languages that do not share similar roots anyway. Its not a very insightful observation to make in the first place.

I see. Having no knowledge of Japanese, I found it interesting. Coming from China, I could say that both Mandarin and Cantonese have popular literal translations for the expression, albeit most Chinese find it cheesy and prefer to use English instead.

In French, Je t'aime means both I love you and I like you.

Oais, mais on dit aussi « Je t'adore »

I wouldn't interpret "I adore you" to be the same thing as "I love you." Though a quick Google suggests that one definition of adore is love and respect deeply.

But it would just never occur to me that adore could be a synonym for love. It just doesn't strike me as such per se.

The meaning can be close to idolatry, which furthers the notion of love-like declarations as parasitic in western semantics.

The semantic equivalent and literal equivalent of the English "I love you" are not the same in many languages. Cultural colors the semantics of nominally equivalent expressions -- don't think of it as a synonym.

There are some languages, for example, that have a literal translation of "I love you" but the semantically equivalent expression, when translated to English, is "you are precious to me". It would be awkward to express the English semantics via literal translation, as it has different connotations. The meaning is more important than the literal expression.

In what languages would you say "you are precious to me"?

It is the approximate translation in some common Austronesian languages e.g. various Philippine dialects. It is sort of like saying the other person is your most prized possession.

The literal translation of "I love you" denotes something closer to "desire" in English.

Thanks.

You might not but believe me that is what you say in France. If you want to get laid there I suggest you jettison your affinity for faux amis (in both senses of the phrase).

I was always confused as a kid because the English word "love" is the same translation for various Greek words like ἔρως, ἀγάπη, and φιλία which used to give me conniptions when doing translations in school.

Likewise Sanskrit and modern Hindi make distinctions impossible to differentiate in English (and not just in love -- I speak English with my relatives in India except for words for how people are related to each other, something English doesn't seem to care about at all, as it only has a tiny number of pretty uninformative words like cousin, brother, aunt and so forth. Oh yeah and food words, but that's not English's fault).

By and large English is an OK language, with a moderate-sized vocabulary handily full of loan words, but even though it's the language I've been speaking longest, as I get older I find it less and less expressive. My wife and I used a mélange of three different languages different ones had different ways of expressing certain things we wanted to say to each other.

To be clear, I wasn't questioning if you were correct.

Thank you for elaborating.

No, not really in French you make the distinction by adding "bien" at the end to clarify that it's liking and not love.

Merci.

It's a bit trickier than that. "J'aime X" is translated to "I love X" if X is a person, but if X is something else, it becomes "I like X". If you really love chocolate, you have to use "J'adore le chocolat" or add some positive adverb to aimer, like "J'aime vraiment/énormément le chocolat".

Funnily enough, while "bien" is also positive word, it's indeed used to lessen the power of "aimer". That's the kind of stuff native speakers don't even notice but can confuse everyone else.

The rule I learnt was aimer with people, adorer with everything else, and add bien to aimer for liking a person instead of love.

I have moved to France, and as a spanish speaker with "te amo" " te quiero" y "Me gustas (I like you)" I find french lacking some words.

I don't think Je t'aime bien its the same as Me gustas and definitely je t'adore doesn't convey the same emotions as te quiero

Something else I've recently found out from an ex, I always thought `te quiero` (in Spanish) meant "I love you", but really means something like "I feel fondness for you" (and can be used between family and close friends), but `te amo` means "I love you". First time she told me, I almost broke down in tears.

It's amazing how much language affects how we relate.

Edit: after learning the difference, and because she wasn't ready to say it, even though I was, and not wanting to make her uncomfortable, I invented `te quieramo` as a nice substitute. She seemed to enjoy that :)

I've always found the subtle variations in roman languages to be interesting. At least in those I know. In spanish, you have "te quiero", from the verb "querer", which also means want. And "te amo", from the verb "amar", which has the same root as the french "aimer" or the italian "amare", used, respectively in "je t'aime" and "ti amo". I don't know about italian, but in french, "aimer" has both the meaning of "querer" and "amar" depending how you use it. Then, you have catalan, which uses "estimar" in "t'estimo", which also is used with both meanings and has the same root as the english esteem.

In Italian you would say "ti amo" to a significant other. When talking about a person you may want a relationship with you would say "mi piace" (I like him/her). If you're referring to a friend or a relative, you would say "ti voglio bene" (which is a different connotation of "I love you").

If you're talking about something, you would say "mi piace" (as in "mi piace il cioccolato" -> "I like chocolate") unless you really like it, in which case you can as well say "amo il cioccolato" ("I love chocolate") or "adoro il cioccolato" ("I adore(?) chocolate").

Does 'mi piace' mean something like 'I desire'?

Nope. That would be "voglio" or "desidero". Maybe you mean "mi piacerebbe" which can be translated as "I'd like".

I had never heard the Catalan version. Really interesting :)

In Belarusian language we have two different "love" words. There is one "love" [кахаю - ka-ha-you] for "I love [ka-ha-you] you / her / him", and there is another one which we use in any other case, like "I love English language". The latter cannot be used when you express your feelings for another person. Oddly enough, I don't think we use ka-ha-you in "I love myself" that often, most likely there will be the same "love" word as in "I love English language".

-ss

The book, "The Five Love Languages" answers the question extremely well. Anyone planning to get married should consider it mandatory reading.

In the Bavarian dialect, you can't say "I love you" without switching out to proper German. We do have at least two words for peeing, though.

I found that after almost 25 years I'd forgotten how to be romantic in English. Despite speaking English also all that time, and watching plenty of rom-coms and the like, I just didn't know how any more.

whorf sapir, lets go

qaparHa'qu'

That's expressing the opposite of hate, however. Which isn't necessarily love.

In Klingon, Love would be better expressed through actions.

In this way, Klingon has the same issue as Japanese.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com