Language Reveals Our Emotional "Hubs"
Recent linguistic research provides heartening support for my perspective. One study (cited here and here) utilized an innovative technique called colexification analysis to reveal universal emotional concepts embedded in languages across the globe. Their network models showed words like "GOOD", "BAD", "WANT", and "LOVE" have the strongest web of associations through multiple languages out of all emotion-related terms. This implies these core emotions are deeply woven into all human experience, and languages adapt their lexicons to encode these meaningful resonances. The researchers explicitly state emotional concepts are "intricately connected to emotions" and play a key role in how languages develop over time. Their methods demonstrate language's innate capacity to uncover conceptual connections rooted in cultural experience. As someone who sees language and culture as reflections of each other, these findings affirm my convictions. Language (and associated rules of grammar) is probably our best and most honest window into human experience.
Equally illuminating is the arc of ideas traced in an article on linguistic relativity. It surveys the long history of beliefs in how language shapes thought, from the conception of unique worldviews encoded in each language's "genius" to the bold hypotheses about the tyranny of linguistic habits over perception. I relate to the feelings driving such views - the sense that my mother tongue connects me to a particular sense of Being that differs from a neighbor's foreign lexicon. But the article also covers skepticism towards sweeping claims of radical relativism, which cautions against exaggerating languages' divergence. The interplay of perspectives shows the complex dance between language, culture, and universal humanity. Recent empiricism grounds earlier speculation in measurable cognitive effects, getting at real phenomena beneath ineffable intuitions. This nuanced history gives me deeper appreciation for how my view of languages as mirrors of cultural insight builds on centuries of thinkers tapping their most profound experiences of words and world.
More specifically, the first two articles reveal “layers” to commonly used words and concepts across cultures. The colexification study identified the emotions of "GOOD", "BAD", "WANT", and "LOVE" as being the “top tier” words/concepts having widespread associations across languages. This implies these specific emotions are more universally shared (or at least expressed) across humanity. They represent the upper layers of experience. By contrast, the intricate web of associations between these core emotions and other more nuanced affective concepts could show greater divergence between cultures. These complex lexical networks may constitute the lower, more variable layers.
Similarly, the history of thought on linguistic relativity points to broad agreement on languages sharing central concepts, while debates focus on whether deeper patterns of reasoning and metaphor vary cross-culturally. The universalist versus relativist arguments suggest academic thought also conceives of conceptual layers, ranging from widely shared human realities to more esoteric cultural divergences.
This layered model reveals universal emotions at the surface but variability in deeper associations, it aligns with the perspective that language evolves to mirror both shared human experiences and each culture's unique insights. The upper layers allow communication of our common humanity, while the lower layers encode nuanced cultural meaning. This would imply that both universalism and relativism capture part of the picture when it comes to connections between language, thought, and culture. We have core similarities as well as meaningful diversities structured into our languages.
This layered perspective adds nuance to my view of how language and culture intertwine. It recognizes languages' deep structure encodes both universal human realities and unique cultural experiences. I find this aligned with my intuition - our shared essence but diverse expressions are mirrored in the depths of our lexicons. Understanding these layers helps integrate universality and relativity, enriching my outlook on languages as windows to the cultures that shaped them.
The emotions identified as most universal - GOOD, LOVE, WANT, BAD - do seem to capture fundamental human experiences shared across cultures. The fact that languages associate these words frequently implies these concepts are woven into the foundations of diverse lexicons. This fits my view that languages evolve to encode both universal and particular cultural insights. GOOD, LOVE, WANT, BAD form the bedrock - a common vocabulary reflecting shared realities.
As we move down layers, we see emotions like JOY, SADNESS, PRIDE that - while still broadly experienced – tend to manifest in culturally unique ways. The diversity of festivals, mourning rituals, and moral codes across societies suggests nuanced expressions of these emotions can differ. Thus diverse languages need rich association networks to capture such cultural variations. This reinforces my conviction that a language's web of words and connections sculpts itself to the contours of a cultural psyche.
Finally, the most specific “lower tier” emotions like ANXIETY, FEAR, and SHAME seem most conditioned by individual life experiences and social environments. The relativity of what evokes these reactions aligns with them needing even more context-dependent lexicons to take shape. This ultimately highlights that both universal and particular emotions leave their impression on our languages - sharing some common affective soil while branching in unique cultural directions. Our words contain multitudes, encoding both our shared hearts and diverse worlds within a language's poetics of experience.
This emotion layering provides a nuanced picture of how our unitary humanity and diverse cultures become ingrained in language. It further cements my view of our mother tongues as intimate mirrors reflecting back both universal and particular facets of human life bound together in a common linguistic web. Our words contain a layered poetry - of both shared soil and branching diversity - giving voice to the breadth of human experience.
But, even more importantly, this comparison of languages clearly suggests that love and want, good and bad are the most fundamental experiences across humanity. Merry, pity, like, desire, pity, pride, hate and anger, though still universal, are secondary. Want is more fundamental than desire. Love is slightly more fundamental than hate, which is encouraging. All of these emotions are more basic than worry, sadness, regret, happiness, joy and envy. The human need and experience for happiness, for example, is not quite as important as we might believe. Our need for love and good (want and bad, too) is more primary than our need for happiness.
For me, this offers an interesting and refreshing perspective. I have never been one, at least in my adult years, to think that happiness should be a primary goal in life. Happiness is something that likely arises as the residue of attending to other factors in your life, such as discovering your sense of good and bad, your sense of want and love. Furthermore, grief and anxiety, as revealed by linguistics, are traditionally not as much a part of human experience as the other emotions I have already mentioned, yet they are slightly more basic than hope, which is another emotion whose value I question. Shame, gloom, fear and surprise are even less basic, though still fundamental, of course.
By not lumping all this together as being equal among their peers we can avoid certain mistakes in our expectations. It is not supported, at least linguistically – which is a mirror into our souls, in my opinion – that fear and anger are on equal footing, for example. Or that anxiety is the equal companion of worry. These are distinctive experiences that we tend to lump together. Of course, they can occur together and feed into one another, but the close study of global languages suggests that the automatic equation of these things is not justified.
It can be argued with some validity that these studies only reveal the past use of language. Though language is the mirror of the soul, so to speak, its use is dynamic and changing and the results of these studies only reveals how humanity has experienced things in the past. Our changing world means that the layering of these emotions will naturally change. Anxiety might be more important today than it was in the past, for example. That certainly seems to be the case. The acceleration of the rate of change coupled with the fairly recent enframing of our Being is distinctive and will result in emotional results that do not map onto past experiences and linguistic expressions.
The mapping of the emotional layers of language through past human experience does not equate to the coming of the Modern, as it were. Perhaps this is one reason the world is becoming increasingly strange to everyone. We don't know how to emotionally relate to the world, we are disoriented and the former emotional structure as revealed by language is transforming. This in itself is a reason for anxiety, for example.
What I would like to see is the colexification of language as used by Generation Z, for example. I think such a generational focus could reveal a very different structure which would be no less of a mirror into the soul of the contemporary world. So, while I am fascinated by the results of these recent articles and will continue to be open to this approach to human experience through language, I do think this is an imprint that tells us much about where we came from whereas what we really need to know is what language tells us about where we are and where we are going.
(Written with assistance from claude.ai.)
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