An anecdote: in contemporary Russian, lovers most readily translates as любовники, and not only has it a strong meaning of people having sex, but also that at least one of them is cheating upon their rightful spouse. The situation you describe would need the word влюбленньіе, literally ‘those in love’.
Yet it’s not impossible for ‘lovers’ to mean exactly ‘those in love’, if you speak colloquially/in a ballad mode.
koibito 恋人 vs. aijin 愛人 -- so it’s only half identical. 人 has kun’yomi hito (from Old Japanese *pi₁to₂), with voicing of the initial consonant in the compound word koibito, and kan’on reading jin. If Wiktionary can be trusted, koibito is the generic term for ‘lover/boyfriend/girlfriend’, whereas aijin was borrowed (regularly) from Chinese to translate the English terms ‘lover’ and ‘sweetheart’, underwent semantic shift in Japanese, and ended up meaning ‘mistress’.
Interestingly, Chinese 愛人 àirén is just an old-fashioned word for ‘lover’, and the word for ‘partner in an extramarital relationship’ is 情人 qíngrén… except Valentine’s Day is qíngrénjié. Wiktionary also thinks there’s a difference in usage of 愛人 àirén between the PRC and the ROC, but it doesn’t describe it.
(Why was rén borrowed as jin? I’m guessing there are borrowing patterns, like how English has borrowed enough from Latin that new Latin borrowings will mangle the vowels in entirely predictable ways, but I don’t know what they are. My first guess was that kan’on readings are based on a dialect of Chinese that had the same ȵ > ȵʑ > ɻ shift as Mandarin. I figured that was too simplistic, but given that 日 has the kan’on reading jitsu and the go’on reading nichi (go’on was earlier than kan’on), it might be right. Aijin is almost certainly regular, since 刃 is rèn in Mandarin and has kan’on jin. *ɻiC > ɻəC? Could be, since the apical vowel can’t occur with a coda consonant.)
(edit: I should probably point out that I don’t actually know most of this stuff—I just know how to look it up. So my sources could be wrong or I could be misinterpreting.)
If you’re going to be using old definitions “lovers = having sex” is a pretty recent change in meaning.
Well, given that I’ve been asked if I was dating someone who lived on the opposite coast, by someone who knew about the fact that she lived on the opposite coast, and knew that I hadn’t been over there in quite some time...
Then again, it could still be a recent change in meaning, just reversed by the internet.
Sure. ‘Lovers’ isn’t contemporary English at all, is it? But if a semantic shift / euphemistically-useful pattern of meaning is found in one place, that means it can occur elsewhere.
(Which reminds me: I’ve heard that ‘dating’ meaning ‘in a relationship with’ is a recent development, and that in the ’50s or so, ‘in a relationship with’ would have been ‘going steady’ and ‘dating’ wasn’t committed or exclusive. Is that true?)
Sure. ‘Lovers’ isn’t contemporary English at all, is it?
It is, but it’s more restricted in usage than it used to be. One might say “the notorious criminal Alice was captured last night, thanks to testimony from her former lover, Bob”, or something along the lines of “Catherine the Great’s numerous lovers”; but one wouldn’t say “this is my lover, Charlie”, and “Dennis and Eve are lovers” would sound stilted, if not exactly incorrect, in most situations. I get the impression that it’s now used with indirection and a slight pejorative air, where originally it might have been a direct, neutral description of a relationship.
(“This is Charlie, my loooover” is a possibility in some dialects, but that construction emphasizes the relationship by drawing attention to the archaism.)
My memory of sitcoms and comics from the ’50s agrees with you.
That’s all that I have to go on; I wasn’t alive myself back then.
All the same, I still think that ‘lover’ is a contemporary word. A bit old-fashioned, and usually singular, but I was alive for a time when a gay man could introduce another man as his ‘lover’ and it would be perfectly natural, with no other word that would mean quite what he wanted to say. (Now he could say ‘fiancé’ or even ‘husband’ and that would seem natural, but once upon a time it wouldn’t have.)
Hell, it wasn’t even considered committed in the 80s. Although I suppose different regions may have changed faster, in the South in the late 80s/early 90s, “going out” was what we said for “going steady”, while “dating” implied a more casual relationship. (And the actual term ‘dating’ was rarely used—I remember being asked, “you guys messin’?” after a couple dates with a boy.)
If you’re going to be using old definitions “lovers = having sex” is a pretty recent change in meaning.
Um, the relevant property is that the man can be sure the woman’s child will be his, and for that “virgin = intact hymen” is useful.
I’m not sure it’s even the current meaning. I would call two religious people who avoid sex before marriage lovers before they have sex.
An anecdote: in contemporary Russian, lovers most readily translates as любовники, and not only has it a strong meaning of people having sex, but also that at least one of them is cheating upon their rightful spouse. The situation you describe would need the word влюбленньіе, literally ‘those in love’.
Yet it’s not impossible for ‘lovers’ to mean exactly ‘those in love’, if you speak colloquially/in a ballad mode.
In Japanese, IIRC, one of these is ‘koibito’ and the other ‘aijin’, written with almost identical kanji, both meaning ‘love person’....
koibito 恋人 vs. aijin 愛人 -- so it’s only half identical. 人 has kun’yomi hito (from Old Japanese *pi₁to₂), with voicing of the initial consonant in the compound word koibito, and kan’on reading jin. If Wiktionary can be trusted, koibito is the generic term for ‘lover/boyfriend/girlfriend’, whereas aijin was borrowed (regularly) from Chinese to translate the English terms ‘lover’ and ‘sweetheart’, underwent semantic shift in Japanese, and ended up meaning ‘mistress’.
Interestingly, Chinese 愛人 àirén is just an old-fashioned word for ‘lover’, and the word for ‘partner in an extramarital relationship’ is 情人 qíngrén… except Valentine’s Day is qíngrénjié. Wiktionary also thinks there’s a difference in usage of 愛人 àirén between the PRC and the ROC, but it doesn’t describe it.
(Why was rén borrowed as jin? I’m guessing there are borrowing patterns, like how English has borrowed enough from Latin that new Latin borrowings will mangle the vowels in entirely predictable ways, but I don’t know what they are. My first guess was that kan’on readings are based on a dialect of Chinese that had the same ȵ > ȵʑ > ɻ shift as Mandarin. I figured that was too simplistic, but given that 日 has the kan’on reading jitsu and the go’on reading nichi (go’on was earlier than kan’on), it might be right. Aijin is almost certainly regular, since 刃 is rèn in Mandarin and has kan’on jin. *ɻiC > ɻəC? Could be, since the apical vowel can’t occur with a coda consonant.)
(edit: I should probably point out that I don’t actually know most of this stuff—I just know how to look it up. So my sources could be wrong or I could be misinterpreting.)
Edit: moved the comment to the right place, sorry.
Well, given that I’ve been asked if I was dating someone who lived on the opposite coast, by someone who knew about the fact that she lived on the opposite coast, and knew that I hadn’t been over there in quite some time...
Then again, it could still be a recent change in meaning, just reversed by the internet.
Dating is one thing, but if you were asked if you were ‘lovers’, then that would seem a strange use of contemporary English to me.
Sure. ‘Lovers’ isn’t contemporary English at all, is it? But if a semantic shift / euphemistically-useful pattern of meaning is found in one place, that means it can occur elsewhere.
(Which reminds me: I’ve heard that ‘dating’ meaning ‘in a relationship with’ is a recent development, and that in the ’50s or so, ‘in a relationship with’ would have been ‘going steady’ and ‘dating’ wasn’t committed or exclusive. Is that true?)
It is, but it’s more restricted in usage than it used to be. One might say “the notorious criminal Alice was captured last night, thanks to testimony from her former lover, Bob”, or something along the lines of “Catherine the Great’s numerous lovers”; but one wouldn’t say “this is my lover, Charlie”, and “Dennis and Eve are lovers” would sound stilted, if not exactly incorrect, in most situations. I get the impression that it’s now used with indirection and a slight pejorative air, where originally it might have been a direct, neutral description of a relationship.
(“This is Charlie, my loooover” is a possibility in some dialects, but that construction emphasizes the relationship by drawing attention to the archaism.)
My memory of sitcoms and comics from the ’50s agrees with you.
That’s all that I have to go on; I wasn’t alive myself back then.
All the same, I still think that ‘lover’ is a contemporary word. A bit old-fashioned, and usually singular, but I was alive for a time when a gay man could introduce another man as his ‘lover’ and it would be perfectly natural, with no other word that would mean quite what he wanted to say. (Now he could say ‘fiancé’ or even ‘husband’ and that would seem natural, but once upon a time it wouldn’t have.)
ETA: Also Nornagest’s ‘former lover’.
Hell, it wasn’t even considered committed in the 80s. Although I suppose different regions may have changed faster, in the South in the late 80s/early 90s, “going out” was what we said for “going steady”, while “dating” implied a more casual relationship. (And the actual term ‘dating’ was rarely used—I remember being asked, “you guys messin’?” after a couple dates with a boy.)
So yes, true.