alt Hacker NewsI find this notion discombobulating every time it pops up. Just because a particular nuance of an emotion doesn't have its own precise word in the local language, it doesn't mean that the locals don't experience it.
Emotions are universal. Even if some hypothetical language has a particular term for an emotion that in English would fall somewhere between "guilt" and "shame", it doesn't mean that English-speakers don't often experience it; they simply lack a term with the exact nuance, because it rarely matters that much, and we can express the idea with the help of a longer sentence.
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> Emotions are universal. they simply lack a term with the exact nuance
You are mistaking culture for language here. That's mistake number one.
Mistake number two is assuming that a language is merely a purely biological response you can easily map to. Emotions as we conceptualise them, exist in a sociocultural context.
You say emotions are universal but, are they? Have you ever experienced what an edo period Samurai was going through after failing his lord? Ever experienced the feeling of passing your rite of passage in an amazonian tribe. No. You can surely interpret those situations through your own lens and experience feelings about your interpretation but that doesn't mean you are feeling what they are feeling. You could have your own interpretation of what falling from a high altitude feels like. It doesn't mean that is going to match the emotion of someone who has actually jumped.
Mistake three is assuming that your own cultural context (which you have ignored) has the same emotional interpretation of a situation as any other context. A situation that in a cultural context might elicit feelings of belonging, in another might elicit feelings of entrapment, anxiety or lack of freedom.
The very idea that everyone experiences the same emotions is itself a cultural byproduct of a culture that often sees itself as the mirror of the world rather than as an additional perspective of it.
If one’s goal is universal appeal, sure. If one’s goal is to capture a very specific time and place and culture, that exact nuance with that name could be very important. Proust spent hundreds of pages in trying to do this sort of thing.