I 

have a box that has followed me 
from one childhood room to the 
next. When I was seven, it rested 
under my bed. At 10, it moved into a 
room upstairs with me and onto a closet 
shelf. When I was 17, it wedged itself 
into a corner between my dresser and 
the wall. Now, it just sits on my desk in 
my apartment. Sometimes I’ll run my 
hand over it in the morning, or I’ll open 
it up when hit by a wave of nostalgia. 
Inside it are love letters of different 
forms — full-length correspondences, 
notes scribbled on scraps of paper and 
cards. The letters have undoubtedly 
changed over the years. Elementary 
school valentines were ousted by notes 
from my high school friends. A card 
from my parents for my 
fourteenth birthday was 
replaced with one from my 
nineteenth. 
They are from classmates, 
friends, 
my 
brothers, 
family, old partners and 
new ones. Each of these 
letters is signed with love, 
and each person who has 
written a note is someone 
I once loved, or still do, in 
return. Even though the 
love I feel for my aunt is 
different from the love I 
feel for my best friend; the 
love I felt for my tenth-
grade boyfriend is different 
from the love I feel for 
my current one; the love 
I felt for my high school 
teammates is different than 
the love I feel for my older 
brother, I still tell them all 
the same thing: I love you.
But the more love I 
experience, 
the 
more 
frustrating it is to realize 
that it is, quite frankly, impossible to 
express the nuances of my love in words. 
We are complex enough to notice the 
slight differences in the love we feel 
for our mother versus for our father, 
yet our words are not complex enough 
to describe those feelings — at least in 
English.
I am not bilingual. I was raised in 
an English-speaking home by English-
speaking parents in English-speaking 
cities with English-spoken “I love 
you’s.” But last December, at a small 
table in the back Chela’s on South 
Fifth Ave, my friend Maggie, who 
grew up speaking Bulgarian, raised 
the question between bites of her taco 
bowl: What if our options for saying 
“I love you” in our native languages 
affect our ability to express — or even 
fully feel — love?
It’s not necessarily a new question, 
or at least the part which posits 
that different languages affect how 
we think and act. Linguists and 
neuroscientists have been asking it for 

decades, and even though it is widely 
debated and hard to prove, it does have 
a name: linguistic relativity, or the 
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, proposes that 
the language we speak fundamentally 
affects how we think, act and perceive 
the world around us.
In one famous experiment, Russian 
speakers and English speakers were 
shown multiple slides, each with three 
blue squares — one on top and two on 
the bottom, in a pyramid shape. Two of 
the squares were the same shade of blue, 
and the third was slightly different. 
The study found that Russian speakers 
were better at quickly discriminating 
between the two shades of blue. 
This, 
the 
researchers 
proposed, 

was because Russian makes linguistic 
distinctions between lighter shades 
of blue and darker ones. Essentially, 
Russian speakers’ cognitive ability to 
identify blue was different from English 
speakers’ ability simply because their 
language has more words to categorize 
the color than English does.
As interesting as it is, being able to 
process colors a little more quickly 
is much different than experiencing 
love in an entirely different way. But 
the opposing view to linguistic relativity 
provides no more comfort: It argues 
that what we experience and perceive 
as culturally important are what we 
put into our language. It would mean 
that English speakers feel less of a need 
to express the nuances, emotions and 
complexities of love since there’s only 
one way to say “I love you” in English. 
That’s just not the case.
Actually, 
it 
seems 
that 
in 
the 
United States, love is everywhere. 
Another 
study 
at 
Baruch 
College 
interviewed dozens of people about 

the use of the phrase “I love you” in 
their various cultures and languages. 
Almost every subject who did not grow 
up with American culture — but instead 
with Korean, Guyanese, Romanian or 
Jamaican cultures, respectively — told 
researchers that their cultures used the 
term “I love you” much less often than 
Americans did.
The 
reasons 
they 
gave 
for 
not 
overusing the phrase were similar: 
Using “I love you” too often detracts 
from its importance; “I love you” is so 
meaningful that you’d only say it to 
someone you intend to marry; saying 
“I love you” before you really mean it is 
shallow.
The phrase is used so generously in 

American culture — especially when the 
year nears Feb. 14 — that I sometimes 
feel it lacks the meaning I want it to have 
when I say it and really, really mean 
it. But what does that say about our 
culture? Are we simply eager to love, or 
is the depth of our love compromised by 
our fervor to feel it? Are other cultures 
somehow more earnest in their ability to 
love?
Seeking to sate some of my curiosity, 
I spoke to a few bilingual people. The 
first was my former Spanish professor 
Wendy Gutierrez-Tashian.
Wendy is from Lima, Perú and teaches 
Spanish in the Residential College. The 
first time I met her was on the first day 
of my freshman year. She speaks quickly 
and with lots of emotion, so I have vivid 
memories of her giving instructions and 
greeting me at the speed of light in a 
language I couldn’t yet comprehend. I 
ended up making it through her Spanish 
class OK, and the conversation we had 
together in Amer’s last week was one of 
our first in English. 

The two main love phrases in Spanish 
are “te quiero” and “te amo.” And 
although they translate pretty well 
to “I love you,” Wendy explained the 
difference to me as “te quiero” as being 
used more often for parents, children 
and friends. In contrast, she says, “For 
me, it’s more emotional to say ‘te amo’ 
because that means that I cannot love 
you more than that — I have reached the 
top of my love.”
But 
“te 
amo” 
is 
not 
reserved 
specifically for romantic relationships 
(although this is the context when it 
is most often used). Instead of being 
expressly romantic, Wendy told me 
“te amo” communicates an incredibly 
powerful, deep kind of love which “te 
quiero” does not.
She 
also 
added 
that 
“te quiero mucho,” “te 
quiero 
muchísimo,” 
“te 
amo mucho” and “te amo 
muchísimo” each convey 
varying depths and levels of 
love, with “te amo mucho” 
and “te amo muchísimo” 
expressing 
something 
Wendy describes as being 
“beyond love.”
She says these linguistic 
differences are apparent 
in behavior as well: “In 
Perú, it’s just normal for 
people to kiss when they 
greet but (in the United 
States), it’s just very subtle 
and transactional and it 
shouldn’t be like that. In 
Latin America it’s not like 
that — you see a friend and 
you hug, you really hug, 
and they don’t let you go.”
There is one culture in 
particular in which people 
show 
their 
love 
almost 
explicitly, as opposed to vocalizing 
it: Japanese. I talked to Engineering 
sophomore Kilala Ichie-Vincent. Over 
the past month, I’ve noticed a few 
things about Kilala: She likes to cook, 
especially with chili oil. Holding her 
hair back from her face are always four 
hair clips, which she color coordinates 
with a vintage sweater or a chic pair 
of denim cargo pants. She’s passionate 
about design and creation, and she’s 
hoping to transfer to the architecture 
school.
Kilala was raised by a Japanese 
mother and Black father in Queens, New 
York. She grew up speaking Japanese 
with her grandparents, visiting them in 
Tokyo and other parts of Japan, but she 
was always trying to balance this with 
being an American kid, teenager and 
then young adult in New York City.

3B

Friday, February 14, 2020 // The Statement
3B

BY ELLIE KATZ, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
Translating love

Read more at 
 
MichiganDaily.com

ILLUSTRATION BY CARA JHANG 
 
 

