> Difficult to communicate affection, impossible to say the word love. We have no distinct word for it.

I wonder what it says about a community that its language has no word for "love".

▲ panative 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That stuck out to me because it’s absolutely untrue. Deitsch/Pennsylvania Dutch has “liiwe/liwe/liewe” (there is no standard written orthography for the language) which is precisely “lieben” in standard German. The author absolutely knows this despite her implicit claim that it’s a loanword rather than part of the vocabulary (which it absolutely is, even if her community is sparing in how they use it in Deitsch).

It’s certainly true that Amish much less the small and peculiar Libby community (which isn’t representative of wider Amish culture although part of it) have different ways of expressing feelings just as Germans are different from Americans and have very different ways of relating.

Bear in mind that she went from a remote group of emergent Amish to UC Berkeley, she is a fairly young writer and obviously still processing her background.

	▲	michalpleban 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you, that makes much more sense now.

▲ trollbridge an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is flatly untrue; the language has a word for love, or people just use the High German or English term for it, along with colloquial expressions (like calling someone sweet).

A statement like this makes the author lose all credibility:

  Neither our language nor our culture invites dwelling in the complexities of grief and loss.

The language certainly can express grief and loss, and people from that culture seem to have no trouble at all in conversations I’ve had with them about such topics. When someone is ill, they conduct fundraisers (I participated in one once, which meant going door to door selling frozen pizzas and then talking to each person with tidbits about the situation), meals are arranged / delivered… if there’s a funeral it goes on for days, many people show up.

This is a common attitude I’ve seen, though, of people who leave the culture / language - a certain type of sneering contempt for how uneducated and culturally poor the group they left is: “Their language is so poor they can’t say the word love or express grief or loss.” It is interesting she claims to want to try to “preserve the language” whilst having a very poor understanding of it.

▲ simonask 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It certainly doesn't say that there is any less love among members of that community.

It would be more correct to say that there is no direct translation for the English word "love". Lots of languages fall in that category. Languages are complicated.

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panative 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s not correct though, because “liiwe/liewe” is a direct translation for it.

	▲	avyeed_desa an hour ago \| parent [-]
		As one of the commentators above mentioned: This might be the literal translation, but the dialect and especially the people from the region this came from don't really use it this way. The "Pfälzische Wörterbuch" (Which also includes some Pennsylvanian Dutch words) has an entry for "lieben" [https://woerterbuchnetz.de/?sigle=PfWB&lemid=L01838], but also notes in the first sentence that it is not used generally. The love concept for people from the Pfalz is expressed differently for this dialect specially. We would say "ich hann dich gern" or "ich hann dich lieb", but never "ich lieb dich". There is even an informal joke from my area, that we are incapable of expressing this feeling properly. Given that most Amish are from here, i can understand what she is referring to, but it seems misplaced for the article specially.

▲ dnpls 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even Dothraki has a word for love!

▲ anthk an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Spanish has distinct words for love: querer and amar.

▲ 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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