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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

My non-english language skill are pretty limited but I remember in spanish the difficulty many people had with the verb gustar. Its the opposite of disgustar which we don't have (not as an antonym of disgust at least) in english. There seemed to be at least a little bit of a common difficulty to the beginning spanish speaker to think of using gustar in a lot of places one might say love but really mean "pleasing to me" instead of any type of romantic love. This conflating of more meanings onto the word love in english and the subsequent difficulty in understanding how another language doesn't do that works seems like it could be used in support of your thesis.

Of course then this countries conservative moral outlook tends to cause (church ladies voice) sex to be treated as something the has to be whispered about. In a self perpetuating manner this creates a situation where we are not as comfortable talking about sex and don't have the number of words or spread of meanings which makes it easy to talk about.

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Robin Hanson's avatar

Gorden, a great question - any multilingual folks care to comment?

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