Is French truly the more emotional language or are we all bound by the same sense of absence?

Lately, I keep coming across a video online that discusses a feature distinguishing a French verb from its counterparts in other languages. The verb in question is “to miss.” In these videos, the French sentence “Tu me manques,” which corresponds to “I miss you,” is explained as meaning “You are missing in me.” This is presented as proof of the emotional and romantic nature of the French language. And indeed, that interpretation fits French perfectly. But what if French isn’t the only language where the concept of “missing” takes shape in this way. What if, in fact, languages far more familiar to us express longing quite similarly?

Unsurprisingly, Italian, which belongs to the same language family as French, follows a similar logic. In Italian, “Mi manchi” also translates roughly to “You are missing in me.” The full version of the sentence would be “Tu mi manchi.” Since the subject is already implied within the verb in Italian, shorter forms like this are very common. Yet this isn’t exactly what I want to focus on; I’m more interested in how this idea appears in very different languages.

Take English, for instance. The verb “to miss” is used to express longing. We say “I miss you.” But notice this: when we lack something, or when something is absent, we use the same verb. For example, if someone is absent from a meeting, we say, “We miss one person.” In that case, we aren’t talking about emotional longing, but about a lack, someone’s absence. Just like in French! And if we trace the word “miss” back to its roots, we find that it originally meant “to fail,” “to go astray,” or “to lose sight of”, meanings that have evolved into today’s emotional sense.

Similarly, in Turkish, the verb “özlemek” comes from the noun “öz,” which means “one’s essence, inner self, or spiritual being.” Seen this way, even Turkish, which is a language unrelated to any of the Western ones mentioned, holds a similar kind of depth.

At this point, French actually may differ from English and Turkish not in meaning, but in syntax. In French, and in Italian too, which, although often compared to Spanish in terms of vocabulary, is grammatically closer to French, the subject of the sentence, the active agent, is “you” (tu). However, in English and Turkish, “you” becomes the indirect object — “the one missing from me.” So even though in French and Italian we express longing with something that sounds emotional and tender, like “You are missing in me,” in English and Turkish we end up saying something very similar in spirit: “You are my missing piece,” or, in an intentionally awkward literal translation, “My you is missing.”

Perhaps because language learning often becomes an exercise in memorization and finding word equivalents, or because our familiarity with our own tongues makes us stop reflecting on their subtleties, we tend to overlook such things. Realizing this, however, fills me with a quiet excitement, and perhaps that’s reason enough to talk about it.

Of course, these are just my small observations. A philologist could certainly shed more light on the matter.

Maybe every language is simply a mirror, reflecting different echoes of the same feeling. 🌙