What languages name, and what they pass over

The anthropologist Robert Levy, from his work in Tahiti in the 1960s, proposed two notions that have remained useful. A state is hypercognised when the language devotes a dense vocabulary and ritual occasions to it, hypocognised when it names it little, forcing it to be described with terms borrowed from other domains, illness or tiredness for instance.

The proposal does not say that what is not named is not felt. It says that language does not make it easily shareable, which changes its social recognition and the treatment it receives.

The Japanese amae, analysed in 1971 by Takeo Doi, designates trustingly relying on another's indulgence. The fago described by Catherine Lutz among the people of Ifaluk combines in one word compassion, love and sadness, and is typically directed at someone in one's charge. The Portuguese saudade is the most cited European example.

Two easy conclusions are to be discarded. These speakers do not feel states inaccessible to others; and these words are not mere curiosities, since they indicate which states a society judges important enough to give a short name.

A study published in 2019 in the journal Science exploited a linguistic phenomenon called colexification, the fact that one word covers several concepts, to map the associations of states in nearly two thousand five hundred languages.

The differences are important: depending on the language family, anxiety is associated with fear, with grief or with anger. But a common constraint appears everywhere: the associations respect two dimensions, the pleasant opposed to the unpleasant and the calm opposed to the activated. No language commonly associates a very pleasant state with a very unpleasant one.

French does not escape the rule. It distinguishes passing irritation poorly from accumulated exasperation, and uses the same word for very different states; it has no short term for the state of someone moved by another's generosity, which other languages name in a word.

It is, by contrast, rich in other registers, notably in the nuances of social awkwardness, which is probably no accident. Every language is fine-grained where its society needs precision.

An instrument translated word for word does not measure the same thing in two languages. Back-translation, where an independent translator translates back into the original language, is the minimum required in research, and it is not enough: one must also check statistically that the items behave the same way in both populations.

This requirement is regularly neglected by tests circulated online, whose French versions are often direct translations of American norms. The score obtained is then compared with a norm that is not that of the respondent's population.