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Comment by GuardianCaveman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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