No Word for Love

It's amazing and tragic to realize that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been only 82 today had he lived; an assassin cut him down at the tender age of 39.

Younger readers might start at my use of "only" and "tender" as modifiers for the two ages mentioned, but this is the perspective one develops over time.

As I suggested yesterday, people continue to develop their mental and emotional capacities as they age; this is precisely why we have the stereotype that old people are wise.

Old people are in fact wise in a number of ways critical for the survival of our species. "Grandparents are the conduits of culture, and without them culture stagnates," notes Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants. One of the key reasons that after millenia of sameness human society developed rapidly and recently into the powerful force it is, is that we developed the capacity to live longer.

But there is nothing inevitable about humans continuing to exist on this planet. Most species go extinct, and if the parts of our world now experiencing negative population growth (Japan and Europe), prove to be the dominant model, after a finite number of generations, humans, too, will disappear.

We are insulated from realizing this in the U.S., because this is the place everyone wants to be. In my lifetime, the population has increased by two and a half times what it was when I was born. But the bulk of that is due to immigration, to such an extent that today we have "illegal immigration" as one of those irksome political issues that divide us bitterly.

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The seafaring Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach Japan, in 1542, where they encountered a people with a language that only captured some of what the visitors considered needed to be said; thus, modern Japanese contains many words of Portuguese origin*. They include the words for alcohol (アルコール), velvet (ビロード / 天鵞絨), swing (ブランコ), button (ボタン / 釦 / 鈕), raincoat (合羽), and bread (パン).

As modern cultures have mixed, our languages are in many ways becoming more and more alike, although the traditional forms, where preserved, continue to divide up reality into different chunks, leaving many things spoken of in one tongue unspoken in the other.

In ares like math or science, languages translate effectively, for the most part. In the emotional realm, however, these cross-cultural gaps become particularly noticeable.

I first became aware of this as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Afghanistan once I was fluent in dari. Encountering a friend on the street, I would unleash a torrent of affection that simply would sound ludicrous in English. ("How is your heart; How is your body?", etc.)

Western cultures celebrate romantic love; the mighty cultures at the eastern end of Asia are still developing that notion. Try to get someone from one of those great countries to say "love" and you'll see what I mean.

Whether the word or the tradition exists or not, once they migrate to the West, Chinese and Japanese people are confronted with a tradition of romance that almost seems alien, because historically, it basically is.

This is just one of many ways that the mixing of peoples reveals contradictions, based in our languages and cultures. Even as the world becomes much more integrated, courtesy of the Internet, we human beings change at a slower pace, it seems.

-30-

* Thank you to my friend S for leading me to this information.