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There's no such thing as a real 1:1 translation between languages anyway. Some words may map that way, but languages as a whole reflect their cultures. A common

There's no such thing as a real 1:1 translation between languages anyway. Some words may map that way, but languages as a whole reflect their cultures. A common example from the New Testament is that English has just one word for "love" whereas Greek has several. We compromise by adding some adjective, like "brotherly love". When learning a language, I've heard its best to not learn a direct mapping to a word in your original language but instead to, for example, place the word for "lamp" on a sticky note and stick it to a lamp in your house. This way you more directly associate the word with the object rather than the name in your original language, because you'll otherwise grow to rely on using your original language as a go-between from ideas to the foreign language, which will make fluency more difficult.

gjm11 7y ago
English has plenty of words for "love" too, even if the distinctions it makes aren't quite the same ones that ancient Greek does. For instance: Liking, caring, lust, enjoyment, admiration, friendship, attraction, affection, worship, loyalty, infatuation. All of them are aspects of things we could refer to as "love", just as much as ἀγάπη, φιλία, στοργή, and ἔρως are in Greek. (I'm not denying that it's enlightening to look at another culture's words and see how they divide the world up differently from ours, and direct attention to things ours might miss. But I get the impression that ever since C S Lewis's "Four Loves" many people think that the ancient Greeks had a richer variety of understanding of human affections than we do because they had four words for "love" and we have only one, and I think that's all wrong.)