Yi, totally agreed on the emotion-expressing part. When I was a kid and my maid would be watching a completely Tamil movie and I'd be peeking over her shoulder, I'd involuntarily burst out laughing when the couple in the field went 'I lowe you' just because it sounded so...incongruous and...out of place in the situation, somehow, after all the perfect, high-class Tamil. Later, when I asked someone to tell me what 'I love you' was in Tamil, no one had a clue. The phrase is practically dead now that the English translation has been discovered. I finally got someone to tell me what the Tamil equivalent was, and it made me blink rapidly several times, because I can't even begin to say it.

Thing is, the 'I lowe you' is said with exactly the same gestures and expressions, and in the same situations, as the Tamil equivalent would be, and to an English-speaker, it doesn't fit in too well...just because it's so different from how it'd be done in English. If you get my drift.

Man, this whole discussion is so interesting. Makes you think, it does. *examines languages through Depp's eyeglass*