75: Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 743 Ratings

🗓️ 15 December 2022

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Emotions are a universal part of the human experience, but the specific ways we express them are mediated through language. For example, English uses the one word “love” for several distinct feelings: familial love, romantic love, platonic love, and loving things (I love this ice cream!), whereas Spanish distinguishes lexically between the less intense querer and the stronger amar. Conversely, many Austronesian languages use the same word for the concepts that English would split as “fear” and “surprise”, while many Nakh-Daghestani (Northeast Caucasian) languages use the same word for the cluster that English splits into “fear”, “anxiety”, and “grief”. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the layers of language that are involved in emotions, from how emotion words form different clusters of related meaning in different language families to how the way your face shape changes when you smile affects the pitch of your voice. We also talk about how our understanding of how to talk about emotion changes throughout history and our lifespan, and how bilingual people feel differently about emotional words in their different languages. Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/703741238379151360/transcript-episode-75-emotions Announcements: Thank you so much for celebrating our 6th anniversary with us! We appreciated all the love and support on social media, and it was great to see you recommending us to other language fans. Thank you to anyone who made an irl recommendation of the podcast, we appreciate you too! In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about stylized Oldey Timey English! We talk about contexts in which pseudo-archaic forms get used, from Gretchen's recent experience with names and titles in a 1492 papal election roleplaying game, to how the language handbook of the Society of Creative Anachronism balances modern-day desires for gender-neutral language with creating historic-feeling titles, and a 1949 academic article cataloguing business names in the New York City phonebook that began with "ye". Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 60+ other bonus episodes, as well as access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds. www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm Here are the links mentioned in the episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/703740969788522496/episode-75-love-and-fury-at-the-linguistics-of

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Linkthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gorn.
0:23.4	And I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And today, we're getting enthusiastic about the linguistics of emotions.
0:28.4	But first, thank you to everyone who recommended us for our anniversary episode.
0:32.2	We've enjoyed sharing six years of Lingthusiasm with you, and it's always nice to see you share it with other people
0:38.3	who need a little more linguistics in their lives.
0:41.0	Our most recent bonus episode was about using pseudo-oldy-timey English for fun and vibes.
0:47.5	Hitherto v to patreon.com slash Lingthusiasm to listen to all our bonus episodes and help keep
0:52.6	the show ad-free.
1:04.1	Music to listen to all our bonus episodes and help keep the show ad-free. Lauren, I have a sort of philosophical question.
1:07.4	Do you think emotions are things like numbers, like things that sort of exist at some level
1:13.1	out in the world, or things that are more like food where what constitutes food is really
1:19.1	culturally specific? I'm going to answer your philosophical question with some linguistic data.
1:24.7	Amazing. There is a really great paper that has looked at how different cultures carve up the
1:32.9	emotion space in terms of the words that they use for different emotions.
1:36.5	That sounds like a really interesting way of answering that question.
1:39.3	So this was a project from Joshua Conrad Jackson and a whole team who looked at how different languages
1:45.9	grouped together different emotions into a single word, a process that they call
1:52.1	colexification.
1:53.8	So if we take a non-emotional, more concrete example of this to start, for example, a word like
2:00.4	Pueblo in Spanish could be translated
2:02.9	into English with either people or village. So this suggests that these two concepts may be more
2:07.9	closely linked in Spanish, where Pueblo can mean both of these things, versus in English where you
	...

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