A brief thought about how the language differences between Russian and English contextualise cause and effect during a child’s first language acquisition period, especially with regard to the concepts of pain and hurting.
Russian children grow up being told “ей/ему больно” when they hit a toy or try to pull the cat’s tail. This roughly translates to “you’re hurting him/her/it,” but not exactly. Its more literal translation is “he/she/it feels pain.” Long-form, it’s “you’re causing him/her/it to feel pain” (ты делаешь ей/ему больно). An American child would likely never hear their parent say “it feels pain” in the same context, only “he doesn’t like that” or “you’re hurting him.”
This is interesting from the standpoint of where it places the blame for the action, how it distributes cause and effect. The Russian child, purely with the language given, reads the concept of pain as intrinsic to the object or person he’s hurting. The child hit the hamster, the hamster now feels pain. To some extent, there is an abstraction with the concept of “you’ve hurt the hamster.” There is another logical step the child has to take from “I’ve hurt something” to “that something is in pain” that just doesn’t exist as a linguistic difference in normal Russian speech. The action has immediately resulted in a consequence, and that consequence is a change in someone else’s state of being. English focuses on the cause (you hurt her) and Russian on the effect (she is hurt).
This is not to say that children growing up in an Anglophone environment are less likely to internalise the ramifications of causing pain. I only mean to bring this up as an interestingly different pathway in terms of language acquisition and emotional awareness. My idiomatic French in child-raising situations is not stellar, but the same concept might be interesting to apply to the French equivalent of these phrases (tu lui fais du mal, you’re doing [something] bad to him), and to other languages. Also of interest might be different emotion-association phrases such as “I missed you” versus the Russian “я по тебе скучал/а” (I was lonely from your absence) or the French “tu me manque” (you were missing from me). Patterns in how these phrases are laid out within and across languages might be interesting to consider as perhaps being tied to the acquisition of compassion and interpersonal relationship emotions during the childhood language acquisition period.
