When we study another language, we often run into distinctions that differ from our own. The other language distinguishes things that we blend together or blends together things that we distinguish. “Love” is just one example.
Consider prepositions: languages that have two or three words for “on” and languages that use the same word for both “at” and “to.” How about verbs that mean both “make” and “do,” using one word where we have two, or that have several different flavors of “go” or “put”? Or that use the same word for both “blue” and “green”?
There are languages that make no distinction between singular and plural, and there are languages that recognize not two choices of verb forms but three, depending on whether the action involves one person, two people, or more than two.
All these difference of language both shape and reflect a difference in thought. And when we learn about them, they stretch our own mental concepts. Whether we think they add precision or confusion, learning about them is good for us because it shakes up our assumptions.