ORGANON 37(40):2008 Robert Zaborowski (Warsaw – Olsztyn, Poland) CAN LANGUAGE DEAL WITH EMOTIONS? * The connection language and emotion makes me think about two differ- ent things: the language of emotions and language about emotions. The first is a matter of the expression of emotions in interjections and the like, the second of the description of emotions. I will deal with the latter. However, I shall not discuss the problem of particular languages and of how they describe, better or worse, emotions 1 . On the one hand the point can be made that, for example, English term feeling is not equivalent to German Gefühl (but the standard translation is this) and the case is more visible when we think about the possible English correspondence for German Erlebnis. On the other hand one can make an objection that the differences in this respect are even bigger between, for instance, Indo–European and American Indian languages 2 . In fact, several elementary issues are related to the language–about– emotion topic. Suppose I am speaking about a group of similar emotions, I mean emotions characterized by similar modus (way) of perceiving objects. One group can include, let us say, sadness, cheerlessness, depression, des- pondency, grief, sorrow, unhappiness, affliction, displeasure, anguish, distress, grief, etc. How should we call this group? If I call it sorrows or sadness, the word sorrow or sadness takes on two meanings, the broader one – for all this group, and the narrower one – for a particular emotion within this group 3 . In my opinion, the problem here is a lack of vocabulary and this is only one example among many others. * The paper in its shorter version was presented at Granada Workshop on Language and Emotion, University of Granada, Sept. 23, 2008. I am grateful to Anthony W. Price for remarks he made on the previous version and for checking my poor English. All remaining imperfections are of my own. 1 For example Ancient Greek language seems to be richer in this respect that many contemporary Euro- pean languages. For the field of fear and courage see R. Zaborowski, La crainte et le courage dans ... . 2 As it had been observed by Benjamin Whorf, [i]n sentences formed in Indo–European languages, the particular components preserve their individual properties (...). The constructions built in this way are combined as a machine is made of its parts, and not as a chemical compound is made by blending of elements that mostly lose their individual character as a result of the blending, what seems be the case of American Indian languages. And: (...) the very nature of the Indo–European languages leads us, or even forces us, to fragment reality (example borrowed from B. L. J. Kaczmarek, Illogical logic, pp. 179–180). 3 Hence, I want to underline the following distinction: when I say individual emotion, I think of an indivi- dual subject’s individual occurrence of an emotion and when I say particular emotion, I mean a kind of emotion, either as genus (e.g. sadness and not joy) or as species (e.g. enjoyment and not delight).