Emotional range

Knowing more languages increases the range of emotion one feels

Things are often lost in translation and what exists in one culture as a "thing" doesn't necessarily exist in another culture. There is a type of frustration (짜증나) that exists in Korean culture where the word for it in English: frustration is a poor imitation of the depth of what it means in Korean. The word for troublesome (めんどくさい）in Japanese that similarly cannot convey the same kind of feeling.

When we look at Saussure and subsequent thinkers (linguists, theorists, or whatever you want to label them), they claim that emotion, things, etc. cannot exist without the word existing. In essence, that something that does not have a name cannot exist. That's a poor, diluted version of what they are saying, but I find there to be quite some truth in it. It's almost as if I didn't have those range of feelings without knowing what it is.

Perhaps this is why people say one should travel. The range of experiences, the range of words that one is exposed to, and the type of thinking that it engenders allows one to be more open-minded (which is I think what it boils down to - we learn to see and accept other cultures and in turn, accept other ways of thinking that we previously would have been unaware of, or closed to).

This feels half-baked. There's more to it, I think, but it's interesting how powerful language is.