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Comment by i5heu | Hacker News Reader

What strikes me about „Love“ is that we lack the vocabulary and the framework to speak about it.

There is not just „Love“ there are a bazillion feelings that fall under this term, and we cannot speak about it.

All the below words are older than steam. Newer ones include limerence. We do not lack the vocabulary. People have been thinking about this for an exceedingly long time.

> Greek words for love and what they mean Eros: Sexual passion. ... Philia: Deep friendship. ... Ludus: Playful love. ... Agape: Love for everyone. ... Pragma: Long-standing love. ... Philautia: Love of the self. ... Storge: Familial love. ... Mania: Obsessive love.

https://parade.com/1274015/charli-moore/greek-words-for-love...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love

What about love of Lisp? What label would you attach to that?

Parenthesis ?

Parentisophilia.

That would be Mania! :))

Technically:

    ((: Mania! :))

These are not words used in common parlance though. They are no help in discussing love with people you'd like to discuss it with.

As with many words to be honest. The only thing to do is to study the concepts and create a shared understanding with friends/family.

We do often distinguish between familial love or brotherly love and romantic love, though.

I agree they should be separate terms, and I believe they actually are in many other languages.

I think I know what you mean, but your assertion seems wrong to me. At times "love" is all what mankind seems to be able to talk about: it's the topic of most songs, but also of literature, cinema, poetry, art in general. I'd risk to say it's the number one topic of art, and we have multiple ways of depicting it and talking about it!

It's, of course, also one topic of science.

I think it is English language problem because we only have one word to cover emotional bonds. I would wager other languages with more terms have it easier. Greek several different word describing types of love; Agape (love of a parent for their child), Eros (erotic love), Philia (love of siblings and close friends), Storge (familial love), Philautia (self love), Xenia (love of guest).

Those Greek words don’t seem to add much over obvious context 99% of the time.

I think this is common for one's internal (not shared) reality. Eskimos have many words for snow as a matter of practicality. Likewise, ideas that do not need to be shared often, or as a matter of survival, end up with much fewer pieces of language dedicated to them, excepting the musings of the bored and comfortable.

Just one post from a long line of debunking posts: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3497

I thought that Douglas Lenat's remarks (at Lex Fridman's podcast) about this were really insightful[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wMKoSRbGVs&t=5691s

What we seem to lack is an education.

The Greeks, for example, and later the Scholastics, already had a much more sophisticated way to speak of love than we seem to. As I wrote elsewhere, love can be erotic and agathonic. Within each we can make finer distinctions, and we can speak of various varieties of love depending on the object (love of father vs. love of son; love of wife vs. love of mother). Love is not an emotion, even if emotions accompany various kinds of love. Ultimately, love is a desiring of the good for oneself or for another. We desire the good because it perfects us or because it perfects another.

Our cultural understanding of love is often very infantile, and that's on the milder end of the spectrum. The very idea that you would leave your spouse because you've "fallen out of love" is preposterously childish.

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