Indeed. If I remember correctly, the author was a relationship/marriage counselor and he witnessed many failing relationships where the partners really loved each other, they just didn’t use the right channels to express it to each other. By saying that different people have different ways how they can best express (and best receive/understand/accept) love, and if they don’t understand what kind of love the other one needs (and can understand) the most, it’s like not knowing the language of each other, it’s not too far-fetched to use the word “language” in this context.
Lets think about it as information theory. If there are 5 different types of ‘information’ that different people are listening for, then we need to reduce the entropy in 5 different channels to get the right information signals. This is much more complicated than trying to just reduce the entropy around 1 thing.
Maybe language isn’t the best term, but all 5 of the information sets are important in different amounts to different human beings. So your utility function is going to get messy.
What is the reason (other than maybe selling books or something) for describing these as languages?
Language exists for communicating something. Here the question is how a person communicates that they love another person.
Indeed. If I remember correctly, the author was a relationship/marriage counselor and he witnessed many failing relationships where the partners really loved each other, they just didn’t use the right channels to express it to each other. By saying that different people have different ways how they can best express (and best receive/understand/accept) love, and if they don’t understand what kind of love the other one needs (and can understand) the most, it’s like not knowing the language of each other, it’s not too far-fetched to use the word “language” in this context.
Lets think about it as information theory. If there are 5 different types of ‘information’ that different people are listening for, then we need to reduce the entropy in 5 different channels to get the right information signals. This is much more complicated than trying to just reduce the entropy around 1 thing.
Maybe language isn’t the best term, but all 5 of the information sets are important in different amounts to different human beings. So your utility function is going to get messy.