Scientists who searched out semantic patterns in nearly 2,500 languages from all over the world found that emotion words — such as angst, grief and happiness — could have very different meanings depending on the language family they originated from.

The findings, described in the journal Science, shed light on the diversity of human feeling expressed around the globe — while still mapping some common linguistic landmarks among the languages' internal emotional landscapes.

"We walk around assuming that everyone else's experience is the same as ours because we name it with the same word, and this suggests that that might not be the case," said senior author Kristen Lindquist, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "I think there are some real implications for how we understand the emotional and social behaviors of people around the world."

Many languages have words whose meanings seem so specific and nuanced that there's no way to translate them; they can only be imported wholesale. Consider the German "schadenfreude," the pleasure derived from another's misfortune, or "sehnsucht," a sort of deep yearning for an alternative life.