earlier today i started to write about how certain languages don’t make the same distinctions which i take for granted in english, and i’d planned to give as one example the fact that there is no distinction between "to like” and “to love” in taiwanese hokkien, i.e. that both ideas can only be expressed using the single word “love” (愛 / Ài). i’d long thought this was strange, especially because the phrase 喜歡 / Xǐhuān for “to like” does exist in mandarin.
but at some point as the day wore on i grew unsure of myself and decided to google “love vs. like in hokkien”, and i found a quora forum post which said that there actually is a hokkien term for “to like" which is not only pronounced but also written differently from the one i was familiar with in mandarin: 佮意 / kah-ì. at first i was unsure if i should trust the answer, so i ran the phrase through Google Translate using traditional chinese (taiwanese/hokkien isn’t available as an input language but ~80%+ of the written characters are the same as traditional chinese so i still use it whenever i can as a sanity check). and instead of “to like,” google translated the phrase as: “to agree with”.
so i texted my sister whose taiwanese and mandarin are both far better than mine to ask if she could confirm that there was a way to say “i like you” in taiwanese as opposed to only being able to profess one’s love. my sister replied that indeed there was: “gah-yee” she wrote, sounding out the words using her own best approximation. she gave an example for added context: “wah-jio-gah-yee-jiah-mhah-wahn” means “I really like eating glutinous dumplings.” Not realizing that her “gah-yee” was the same as the quora poster’s kah-ì, I asked her if she knew how to write it using chinese characters - i.e. was it 喜歡, the term which in mandarin would have been pronounced as Xǐhuān? She came back to me after searching two different mandarin-to-taiwanese dictionaries: the correct romanization was not “gah-yee” but rather “kah-ì,” and indeed the written term was 佮意, different from the mandarin 喜歡 /Xǐhuān.
as i read her replies i had some type of flashback where i suddenly remembered having heard the phrase kah-ì at least a dozen times, a handful of times from my mother and father but also sprinkled throughout various other overheard conversations over the years, although i clearly never actually understood what it meant. until today’s impromptu mini-lesson i probably would have thought my sister’s example “wah-jio-gah-yee-jiah-mhah-wahn” meant something like “i’m really used to eating glutinous dumplings” instead of i really like them.
anyways, here’s my second example of missing distinctions in other languages: in german, there’s no word for pie. this is particularly hard for me to swallow because of the sheer variety of german cakes i have encountered while living here, from cream- and pudding- filled layer cakes to crumbles and tarts to lovely sheet cakes like this donauwelle. the german imagination for cake far exceeds anything I’d encountered while living in the US. but somehow, germans not only don’t have an equivalent word for pie, they also don’t really eat anything resembling pie (neither sweet nor savory), and don’t seem to see what the big fuss is about either. the idea of a doughy, golden-brown lattice criss-crossing over a bubbling hot berry filling is just not a version of dessert which germans have made room for. I’m not sure what i find more troubling: that my life here is devoid of pie, or that i’d once believed that there was only one word in taiwanese to describe my affinity for it.
Any discussion of language is my jam, and this was honest and informative- but damn that last line....killer!
This is something we probably forget to think about as we communicate across languages. It really shapes how we see the world. Reading your examples made me think of the Swedish word “lagom” which is a word that describes when something is just enough. Not too much, not too little -- lagom.