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Comment by cjohnson318 | Hacker News Reader

> In Swedish... someone happy in the moment is called glad... Someone happy in the longer-term is called lycklig. And we are not just some millions of weirdos in the northernmost of Europe. The Germans are froh when they are happy in the short term and glücklich when they are happy in the long term...

Just because you don't have a dedicated word for something, doesn't mean that it is a foreign concept. In Arabic and Hebrew there's no dedicated verbs for "to have" or "to be" in the present tense, and yet these societies understand ownership and existence in the present perfectly. You can't take, like, two words from a language, and then say something meaningful about a whole society.

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Yet other times the lack of that word denotes a different perspective on that subject.

Short term or long term happiness isn’t differentiated in the untied states. I don’t think of happiness in terms of long or short term. Just as a temporary state that hopefully last a long time.

Think of all the words we use to express love in English. In Chinese a word technically exists for love but it’s not used between people more for things but even then it’s not the same word. This is a perfect example of the characteristics of a language representing a change of perception on something as powerful as expressing love.

Interesting point about English. You're right, having a single word for "I am happy the light turned green just as I approached the intersection" and "I have 10 children and I am proud of the kind of people they turned out to be" really blunts the nuance.

In my parlance, I'd call the second thing "meaningful" but not everyone strives for meaning (or think it matters) so it kinda doesn't have the same mindshare as the "by-default-short-term" happy.

Y'all are saying that because Americans don't have a single term for "long term happiness" and a separate term for "short term happiness," then that creates some kind of blindspot for Americans. We understand how to put multiple terms together to express nuanced ideas.

> In Chinese a word technically exists for love but it’s not used between people more for things but even then it’s not the same word. This is a perfect example of the characteristics of a language representing a change of perception on something as powerful as expressing love.

This sounds like a cultural norm around language use. There's examples of this in English. You might say, "I love lamp." That's weird, it's a non-standard use for the word "love," but people would give you the benefit of the doubt and note that you "like" the lamp.

Chinese is a particularly bad example since as a language it builds concepts out of multiple smaller terms far more explicitly than English.

> We understand how to put multiple terms together to express nuanced ideas.

That's not the same as having a single word that embodies a specific concept, that helps/shorten the expression/sharing of it.

If you don't have this single concept that stands for itself, and/or that you don't know the word, as long as you can't name it, it's hard if not impossible to see it. That's why we give a name to things or people we find/meet.

See shades of white (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_white), plural forms, different depending on the language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural#Use_in_systems_of_gramm...), love (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love) if only in Greek where it has at least 6 very distinct ones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love).

But, also, that knack for ambiguity and second and third order meaning in apparently detached sentences in some languages, it has its own charms.

Yet you do think of some people as a happy or jolly people and others as gloomy. This is the difference that is denoted here where your trying to describe a more general long term state of mind of a person.

Language determines how one thinks. People from different cultures count differently for example, and that affect how people do math. "two-dozen is two times a dozen" is more intuitive than "twenty four is two times twelve". To me twenty four and twelve are just two words, but two-dozen is clearly double twelve. Another example is the words brothers and sisters, where being older and younger less emphasized. In many asian cultures, where age is considered a prestige (or is it not?), there is a clear distinction between older and younger children.

> Language determines how one thinks.

This is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (though it's mostly Whorf's), and it's been largely debunked. Language may have some limited influence of perception of colours and innate direction, but probably not much more than that.

Actually, ״to be״ in Hebrew translates to להיות (l’hyot), depending on the context.

“I want to be at home” “אני רוצה להיות בבית״

Sure, but in most cases its conjugations are just left out entirely, as in "קר לי"; literally "cold to me" (I am cold). "אני רעב" -> "I hungry" (leaving out the "am" English speakers would put it there), etc.

That's just a zero copula language. Nothing weird about that. The concept is still present in the language.

The Dutch use "blij" (short-term) and "gelukkig" (long-term).

OMG this.

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