Sometimes you don’t even notice that your language has an ambiguity problem until you try translating it.
In my native Spanish, “to wish” and “to desire” are expressed by the same word, and it took me years to realize that the English “wish” and “desire” were different concepts. (This was a huge source of confusion when I was studying Buddhism.)
Similarly, “to await”, “to hope” and “to expect” are the same word in Spanish. (One song in Spanish by Shakira has a funny verse that uses the same word three times, but by the specific usage you can tell it should translate as “I hope you don’t expect me to wait for you.”)
I don’t know what specific circumstances prompted Spanish to conflate those sets of concepts under unifying words (or maybe what happened was that English had some reason to separate originally closer concepts; I don’t know), but this is a big blind spot for people not exposed to other languages.
English does have words like crave, cherish, yearn and lust to specify certain subtypes of love. It’s just that people don’t like to use them and prefer to use a word that’s more ambigious. I don’t think it’s a problem that English offers the ability to be ambigious in this instance.
Sometimes you don’t even notice that your language has an ambiguity problem until you try translating it.
In my native Spanish, “to wish” and “to desire” are expressed by the same word, and it took me years to realize that the English “wish” and “desire” were different concepts. (This was a huge source of confusion when I was studying Buddhism.)
Similarly, “to await”, “to hope” and “to expect” are the same word in Spanish. (One song in Spanish by Shakira has a funny verse that uses the same word three times, but by the specific usage you can tell it should translate as “I hope you don’t expect me to wait for you.”)
I don’t know what specific circumstances prompted Spanish to conflate those sets of concepts under unifying words (or maybe what happened was that English had some reason to separate originally closer concepts; I don’t know), but this is a big blind spot for people not exposed to other languages.
English has a big ambiguity problem with the word “love”...
English does have words like crave, cherish, yearn and lust to specify certain subtypes of love. It’s just that people don’t like to use them and prefer to use a word that’s more ambigious. I don’t think it’s a problem that English offers the ability to be ambigious in this instance.