Does the English language need more words for the different ideas of "love?"?

The English language doesn’t need any more words, at all.

Besides, everything depends on context. So still no.

I think we have already started using the Greek words when we want to clarify our definition. At least people I know do.

We could use (and some do) the several Greek words for love. If we had those distinctions in English, I feel sure we would find them useful.

However, it is also interesting to see how poets meet the challenge of talking about love without constantly repeating the word. The sheer limitation inspires creativity.

hmm yeah I see what you guys are saying, I didn’t realise some people have started using Greek words?

Well, they’ve been around a long time, and they are especially apt to come up in certain contexts, such as the study of the New Testament, which was written in Greek and hence did make the distinctions. Bible students can gain a great deal of insight by looking at the original language for things, just as scholars can when studying anything in translation. I don’t think those terms are in general use, but a well educated person would probably be familiar with them.

Yes. I think English needs more words for love.

What, love and lurve aren’t enough words for you?

the english language has many, many words for the different kinds of love, but only an English major, and a word nut like myself ever uses them.

@Judi @Jeruba Many of the fine words we can use are also borrowed from the French, the Latin, and, yes, even old Germanic (Goth).

Like the Greek mentioned above, Spanish has different words for love depending on what you are loving. My Spanish is not great so I hope someone corrects me here. Like if I love pizza I would say, “me encanta pizza.” But I don’t think you use encantar for a person. If I want to tell my husband I love him, I would use Amor or Querer, “Te Amo” or Te quiero.” So one is romantic love and one is love for an object or thing. We don’t make this differentiation in English really. Although there are synonyms for love, the actual word love can be used almost anywhere for anything,

I don’t think it could ever hurt to have another word or two for something as wonderful as love. We’re off to a good start with lurve, don’t you think?

Three things that often get confused: Sex(ual attraction), romance, and plain (non-sexual, non-romantic) love. No new words needed, though maybe adjectives, context, or phrases or terms.

Very nice response, @augustlan. Lurve to you.

I don’t speak the language, but I’ve read that Sanskrit has more than 70 different words to express the nuances of love.

Sure why not. It’s not as if we’ve reached a quota of some kind.

I am kind of partial to a song entitled “Have I told you lately that I lurve you”

no, the english speaking people just need to expand their vocabularies.

The word love means many things according to the conext that you put them in, by association people know if you are talking about your parents and you say you love them, it’s going to mean something different to when you are talking about loving ice cream when it’s hot!
Love is love unless it’s felt by the people on fluther

I’m starting the campaign to get the word lurve in the OED! Any thoughts on definitions/entries underneath?

LURVE to you all…

@prude Good point.

Love, lurve, loerve, luv, lehuve, louve, louive, and lahhhve. There’s eight, and five of them I made up on the spot. Use them as you see fit, I have no copyright on them. =)

Oh, and don’t forget Judi’s ‘Fluve’!

@evelyns_pet_zebra awsome :) and @augustlan like it!

English has more words than any other language and new words are being created all the time. What does it say about us that we only have one word for love, but several good ones for hate, like detest, loathe and abhor and phrases like can’t stand?

@LostInParadise more importantly, why do we only have one word for brain, but a thousand words for breasts?

What does it say about us, @LostInParadise? Well, I see what you’re suggesting, and maybe you’re right, but I’m going to offer alternative views just for the sake of perspective.

— We do have many familiar words for kinds and degrees of love, such as affection, warmth, fondness, adoration, passion, liking, worship, attachment, devotion, and so on. I don’t know why we’d imagine we don’t.
— We may think we need lots of ways to cloak negative emotions and to make fine distinctions among them.
— We sense the essential unity of all kinds of love.
— We have better and more important ways of expressing love than bare words.
— We are constantly adding words through technical and specialized vocabularies, professional jargon, borrowings, and slang, but the old basics—life and death, love and hate, hearth and home, earth and sky, heart and hand—haven’t needed any amendment in a long, long time.

No. No more words. In my opinion there are too many words now. Words are cumbersome and, IMO, cannot truly convey what people are thinking and feeling anyway.

You know what? I hope no one actually LOVES their car – that’s just sad

Robert Burns liked to use Luve

@JLeslie I guess the Spanish words that can be translated as “love” can be disambiguated by their literal translations. For the examples you use, “me encanta pizza.” can be literally translated as “Pizza enchants me!” I think the same can be pointed out for the verb “Yo quiero”, which I would usually translate as “I want!”

Maybe “Yo quiero Taco Bell!” has a double meaning!

@evelyns_pet_zebra , And why is there no clean equivalent for the f word, but the word rape is considered okay? I think this holds in most other languages also. And, to hold off any objections, words like mate and copulate don’t cut it because they do not take a direct object.

My dearest, sweet, precious, charming, cherished adorable angels; In the synonym column of Thesaurus, I counted nearly two hundred words that can be used for various forms of love.

Name five

@Simone_De_Beauvoir I know people who do, but I also know people who clearly lurve their iphones too!

@Simone_De_Beauvoir I love my truck, not enough to try and copulate with it, but you know, other than myself and my mechanic, no one else is allowed to drive it. I let my wife behind the wheel twice, but only to teach her how to drive a stick, and I was riding shotgun.

I don’t get this. English has about 50 words for different types of love according to my thesaurus.

At the risk of repeating myself, name five synonyms for the verb to love.

admire, lust, adore, cherish, be crazy about

You might argue that none of these have the same meaning as “love” – of course they don’t, no two synonyms mean exactly the same thing. Even the famous four Greek words for love don’t all mean the same thing.

@LostInParadise Look here for the full list. The way I understand this question there are many different kinds of love, and they each need a different word to express them properly. It sounds to me like you are reversing to ask for exact duplicates.

There are more phrases than I had thought there were, though not much in the way of single word substitutions. Cherish works. A lot of the others are about admiration, which is not quite the same as love.

@LostInParadise That is the point. Cherish is not quite the same as puppy love which is not the same a parental love, which is not the same thing as sibling love and so on and so on. There are as many words for expressing the different kinds of love as we need, but most people stick to just the one word.

what’s the word for fluttery new relationship love?

@Point5r rapture, yearning, infatuation, enchantment, fascination, smitten, hankering, sparking

@point5r, didn’t you see Bambi? It’s Twitterpated.

@Judi I don’t get it?....Sorry! I’m just a bit confused now!

You need to rent Disney’s Bambi. Twitterpated is what happens to the animals in the spring :-)

Ooooh ok sorry I have a copy of bambi somewhere….on VHS! So I havn’t watched it in a while. I thought it was a complicated modern joke, sorry but now whenever I see the word twitter, I’ll just think of the site.

@Zaku I’m in agreement. We don’t need more words for love, just use appropriate adjectives to differentiate.

I think people misuse the word love as a strong liking for (an inanimate object or activity).

@Yetanotheruser my thoughts exactly in reference to @JLeslie the literal translations of her spanish do not have the primary meaning of “to love” except amar. Not to say that she is incorrect, as those are common usages/translations.

@Meribast Definitely not to saying any of the uses are incorrect. The word “love” has such a wide veriety in its meaning that the definition is extremely dependent on context; that being the case, it can have a variety of meanings when translated to just about any other language, in this case, Spanish.

@Zaku I love a good beer and I love my wife. Definitely two very different meanings of the word! A good beer never disagrees with me!

I do not think that the English language needs more words for “love”. I think that the problem lies with the lack of people who know how to use the English language.

@MrBr00ks GA—Welcome to fluther

TY, ty very much.

No. English already has both major meanings covered like a blanket:
(1) wishing to benefit the other—charity, altruism, loving-kindness, agape….
(2) wishing to possess the other—desire, lust, greed, covetousness….

The lexicon of English is much larger than that of any other language (except, perhaps, that, technically, certain agglutinative-style languages might be able to take advantage of combinatorial explosion, such as German), so English usually has more than enough words to convey small distinctions.

Side remark: note that the Second Great Commandment really means “love everyone else as much as you love yourself.”

@Yetanotheruser : Burns was just using a sensible spelling (possibly to demonstrate that he was a hard-headed Scot, not an effete Englishman)—at that era, in both Scots and English, “love” rhymed with “move” and “prove” (and not with “cove” and “hove” [note how i prudently didn’t say “dove”, not that the strong past tense of “dive” isn’t getting flattened these days anyway]); for example, there is a Shakespeare sonnet that begins,
“Come live with me and be my love,
.And we will all the pleasures prove”
(which then meant “test”—cf. Sp. “prueba” and English “probe”).

How about how the Beatles pronounced “Love, love, love (...love is all you need)”—actually almost as close to “lurve” as to the way we in the USA today say “love”.

But I still love my wife in a very different way than I love a good beer!

Hey, that’s your problem and that of the beer companies—don’t be complaining to me about the superior attractions of your wife!

@Point5r : how could there be an over-use of the idea of love?
Love’s the only thing that there’s just too little of!

@LexWordsmith I’m not complaining about my wife or a good beer. But I couldn’t describe my love for her in terms of “more taste-less filling” or anything like that!

@Yetanotheruser : Does she like beer? Perhaps you could ask her whether she thinks of you in terms of “more taste—more filling”?

According to www.dictionary.com (the gamma version 2010 coming out, I have an advance copy):

*Love*  /lʌv/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [luhv] Verb, loved, lov⋅ing.

–noun 1. a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.

2. a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.

3. sexual passion or desire.

4. Synonyms: lurve from (internet) flutherspeak circa 2007.

We’s famous! Yippee!!!

I loved this question and subsequent thread. I really fluved it.

Like the Inuit have over 100 words for snow?

@zenele no they don’t
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000405.html

@morphail Thank you for that clarification.

Note: I asked it in the question form, as in, “Like, the Inuit have over 100 words for snow,” meaning, “Of course the Inuit do not have over 100 words of snow, but rather, the list of snow-referring roots to stick them on isn’t that long: qani – for a snowflake, api – for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning “slush”, a root meaning “blizzard”, a root meaning “drift”, and a few others—very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit.

That does not mean there are huge numbers of unrelated basic terms for huge numbers of finely differentiated snow types. It means that the notion of fixing a number of snow words, or even a definition of what a word for snow would be, is meaningless for these languages. You could write down not just thousands but millions of words built from roots that refer to snow if you had the time. But they would all be derivatives of a fairly small number of roots. And you could write down just as many derivatives of any other root: fish, or coffee, or excrement.

And the derivatives wouldn’t all be nouns. If you wanted to say “They were wandering around gathering up lots of stuff that looked like snowflakes” (or fish, or coffee), you could do that with one word, very roughly as follows. You would take the “snowflake” root qani- (or the “fish” root or whatever); add a visual similarity postbase to get a stem meaning “looking like ____”; add a quantity postbase to get a stem meaning “stuff looking like ____”; add an augmentative postbase to get a stem meaning “lots of stuff looking like ____”; add another postbase to get a stem meaning “gathering lots of stuff looking like ____”; add yet another postbase to get a stem meaning “peripatetically gathering up lots of stuff looking like ____”; and then inflect the whole thing as a verb in the 3rd-person plural subject 3rd-person singular object past tense form; and you’re done. Astounding. One word to express a whole sentence. But even if you choose qani- as your root, what you get could hardly be called a word for snow. It’s a verb with an understood subject pronoun.

(Taken shamelessly from the link provided for your linguistic orgasmic pleasure, jellies.)

I love the way this old thread has awakened!