The mainstream cultural output of the United States is obsessed with the idea of love. It is the substance of our reality shows, millions of collective dating app downloads, the kitschy decor which paints every department store red for February and the subplot within all our most popular songs, films and literature.
And yet, for a culture so enamored with love, the dominant language of our society is relatively ill-equipped to provide a meaningful definition of the word.
Colexification is a linguistic phenomenon in which a single word contains multiple distinctive meanings. When a word represents multiple words in another language, linguists consider it colexified.
For example, in Czech, “ahoj” translates to hello and goodbye in English. In many Austronesian languages, there is just one word that means both five and hand, and the English words month and moon are represented by only one word across 327 different languages.
This brings us to a highly colexified word within the English language—love.
Is love an emotion, an action, a temperament, a situation? Is it spiritual, extrinsic, innate, self-interested, altruistic?
As far as English is concerned, it could be any of these. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the noun love has 24 different meanings. These meanings include: a feeling or disposition of deep affection or fondness for someone, a strong liking for something, an intense feeling of romantic attachment based on an attraction and sexual desire or lust.
As a verb, the OED defines love with 16 definitions, which are generally “to have the feeling” of one such variety of love. Love could apply to places or things, acquaintances, family or a friend you would die for.
You could love pizza, love your co-workers or love your situationship, but not necessarily be attached to them. You could love your mom, but not like her. You could have a house full of love or a healthy marriage void of it.
These interpretations of love—and many more—are too vague, contradictory and distinct from one another to warrant a consistent, clear and shared understanding of the word.
This is not the case for many other languages.
For example, Sanskrit is said to have hundreds of different words that fall on the spectrum of English love.
There is an emotional, causeless love which appears spontaneously but is not everlasting.
There is a love born out of familiarity. A proclivity for something or someone simply because it has been experienced before.
There is a love of tenderness which flows from senior to junior—for example, the tenderness from father to son or teacher to student.
There is also the inverse of this love which is defined by devotion and respect.
In Japanese, the word “amae” exists. It refers to a kind of love based on sacrificial or service-like behaviors in which one party experiences love through feeling needed, while the other experiences love through feeling indulged.
The word “ai” in Japanese—often associated with maternal love—is characterized by selflessness.
The word “koi,” on the other hand, is love that can be motivated by self-interest and carries romantic or sexual connotations.
A third word which combines “ai” and “koi” implies both romance and benevolence.
Of course, speakers of English can modify and expand an uncertain notion of love through explication to meet the more specific loves available in other languages. Yet the fact remains that English has collapsed a complex, multifaceted human experience into a single word and that in itself is culturally indicative.
Colexification is not random. Words which are highly relevant to a society or difficult to distinguish from one another in context are rarely colexified.
For example, the words snow and ice are colexified in languages such as Hausa, Nahuatl and Hawaiian—languages native to Nigeria, Central Mexico and Hawaii, respectively. This specific colexification does not occur in languages native to colder landscapes, where snow and ice are much more prevalent and much more helpful to distinguish from one another.
So does the colexification of love say something about how speakers of English understand, distinguish or value the concept of love? Or rather, concepts? Socially speaking, the ambiguity is, at the very least, meaningfully problematic for reasons of interpersonal misunderstandings.
An ILY—aka I love you—could be sent or received as a fortified like, as friendly affection or something indeterminably more.
Misinterpreting love can be dangerous. If love as a verb is to have some undefined feeling called love, then there should be no reason why someone couldn’t love their child, partner, brother, etc. and simultaneously mistreat them.
Whether the abuser in a relationship is capable of loving the abused, or vice versa, is certainly not universally agreed upon, particularly for those inside the relationship. Unfortunately, it is often some interpretation of love employed as justification for abuse and mistreatment in a relationship.
Thomas Fiffer wrote an article about the role of love in abusive relationships. “Understanding that something can feel like love but not be love is a crucial distinction,” Fiffer stated. “For the abusive partner, what feels like love is complete, unconditional acceptance. For the abused partner, what feels like love is special treatment—being the sole and intense focus of another’s attention, warmth, and desire.”
By these standards, a loving feeling which lacks loving action is not love at all. This makes the definition of verbal love proposed by the OED and English-speaking society practically meaningless—a fallacy of circular logic.