Washington (AFP)

What is love? Anger? Pride? These seemingly identical emotional concepts around the world actually cover nuances varied by language, researchers reported on Thursday in a study using a new tool in comparative linguistics.

Sometimes words describing emotions are so specific that they seem culturally exclusive. Thus the German word "Sehnsucht", which means "desire for an alternative life", has no direct translation into French. The word "awumbuk", from the language of the Baining people in Papua New Guinea, describes the void of energy felt after the departure of a guest.

But many emotional states share the same vocabulary, and it was they who interested researchers from the University of North Carolina and the German Max Planck Institute in this study published by the journal Science. In total, nearly 2,500 languages ​​were included in the analysis.

The researchers concentrated on words which have, in the same language, different meanings according to the context, but nevertheless close: thus the word "woman", in French, means "wife" or "human".

In English, "funny" can mean "funny" or "strange", but strange things are often considered funny too. In Russian, the word "ruka" is used to designate both the hand and the arm, as "ki" in Japanese can mean tree or wood.

The researchers statistically mapped all these words in order to group them by nuances, and to compare the languages ​​and the families of languages. They realized that words translated in the same way from one language to another could actually have large varieties of nuances.

For example, in Austronesian languages, the word "surprise" is associated with "fear", while in the Tai-Kadai languages ​​spoken in Southeast Asia and southern China, surprise is associated with the concepts of "desire" and "hope".

"Anxiety" is close to "anger" in Indo-European languages, but related to "mourning" and "regret" in Austro-Asian languages.

And the word "pride" is correlated with more or less positive or negative emotions depending on the culture.

- Innate emotions -

"Not all linguistic families see emotions in the same way, it is a very important discovery on such a large scale," the study's lead author, Kristen Lindquist, told AFP.

According to her, the geographic proximity between families of languages ​​is found in the proximity of emotional concepts.

This is not to say that no universal rule unites languages. Thus, all languages ​​separate emotions according to whether they correspond to pleasant or unpleasant experiences, and to strong or weak intensities.

Few languages, for example, associate sadness, an emotion of low intensity, with anger, the intensity of which is high. "Happy" and "regret" are never close either.

These fundamental separations reinforce the idea that certain primary emotions are innate and registered in the brains of mammals, then were shaped during millennia of human activities, before being named.

"There are basic emotional bricks, but humans have built on these bricks for thousands of years within our cultures," said Joshua Jackson, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina.

As for love, it turns out that in some cultures, the concept has a slightly negative tinge. Residents of Rotuma Island in Fiji associate it with regret and pity. Elsewhere, for example in the Creole language of Seychelles, love is more "happy" and "joyful".

© 2019 AFP