One of the most notable inadequacies of the English language is the fact that we have the same word to describe all forms of love.  We cannot possibly love our job, our mother, our significant other, our favorite food or sports team, or hobbies or vehicles in the same way.  A large part of the problem with our fondness for love songs is that our word for love is so vague that there is a lot of room for ambiguity and miscommunication when two people tell each other that they love each other but mean different things by it.  The Greeks of course famously had four words for love, one of which referred to erotic/romantic love, one of which referred to the love one has for family members, another for fondness or affection, and another for self-sacrificial and unconditional love.  Knowing that there are different words that describe different types or levels of love, one can have a conversation that reflects this and have some hope of understanding the sorts of love that one has for another, so long as one is being honest and talking with someone else who is also being honest, of course.

There are several ways that languages can be inadequate.  If we are talking about the way that the English language is inadequate when it comes to love, the most obvious way that a language can be inadequate is in its failure to distinguish something that is useful to understand.  Yet here there are always tradeoffs.  The more words one has to describe something, and differentiate between dozens of different types of snow or love, for example, the more effort that must be expended into learning those words and the less space that people will have to remember something else.  There are plenty of cases where a language has a lot of words that allow for a great deal of distinguishing but at the same time those words may not always be understood, as is frequently the case in English where more than 800,000 words are defined by our most complete dictionaries but where the average vocabulary is only about 20,000 words or so.  In English too we have the tendency of taking words from other languages that we come across, and there is a large set of cases where there are duplicates in English based on Old English and English based on Middle French that have a stark class divide in terms of the meanings of words and the identity of the person using them–sheep being Germanic and mutton being Norman French, for example, or cow as opposed to beef.

Yet while it is easy to blame languages for their inadequacies, it is really we ourselves that are responsible for most of the problems with languages that we find.  For example, when we use words sarcastically or to say something opposite of what we actually mean, or if we speak using words deceitfully, we are misusing the language that we have and making it deliberately hard for someone to understand us and what we mean.  It is no fair to blame the English language for ambiguity in the word love if we are not clear about communicating its parameters to others, even if it takes more words.  Likewise, if we are attempting to deceive others, we cannot blame the language we speak if we use words incorrectly or deceitfully.  After all, all languages are limited because there are things that they do not have words for, but if we want to communicate we can take the time and effort to convey what we think and feel to others, so long as they are willing to listen.  Most of the time our communication does not fail because of the inadequacies of language, but because of the inadequacies of the people using those languages improperly or inexpertly.

And that presents us with an obvious difficulty.  We want to escape responsibility for our flaws in communication so we blame our language.  But while some languages are better skilled at handling different areas of life, it remains for us to use languages to convey the truth, and if we cannot do that the fault is not our languages but instead ourselves.  To the extent that we know our language well, we know it’s limitations and seek to work around them, the same way that we can know the limitations of ourselves and of our coworkers and loved ones and so forth and work around them, putting people in a situation where they are at their best advantage.  To be sure, it is rare when we treat ourselves and our language and those around us as things that have obvious limitations that one can work around and overcome, but that is because it is rare that we seek to understand others.  One of the negative aspects of being in a self-absorbed age is that we want so badly to be understood, at least as we want to be understood, but do not spend much effort in understanding others or the world around us.  And that is a great shame.