As others have already noted, Evans argues in his piece for the role of emotion as a common part of the human experience. Although some of what we would classify of emotion is highly specific to an individual culture or background, anthropology today suggests there are some human emotions that can be considered constant across the whole of humanity.

Where this interests me is in Evans’ discussion of the concept of the word 甘え, or amae. (Side-note: The character 甘 carries the meaning sweet, which seems fitting). Although the word does not exist in English, the ultimate feeling that Evans argues can be summed up with the word amae can still be experienced by non-Japanese people. This flies in direct contrast to the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also known as linguistic relativism. Sapir-Whorf is the concept that our thought processes are constrained by the language within which we operate to the extent that considering a reality outside of our linguistic construction becomes endlessly difficult. When Orwell considered the terror of Newspeak, with its doubleplus good here and Miniluv there, it was with Sapir-Whorf in mind because he viewed the implementation of Newspeak as a political process to undermine the ability of the masses to critique the undemocratic society in which they lived. If anything, that there is a core of the human experience in the form of a set of emotions that remain consistent across languages and cultures should provide us comfort not only that we can more confidently wade into the literature of the medieval era but also that the emotions we express now can be followed by those long after we pass.