Je te manque

One of the more random surprising things about the French language is the verb manquer, which means to miss something. However, it doesn't work like you would expect coming from English. Je te manque doesn't mean "I miss you", it actually means "you miss me"; the verb works backwards! At first blush that seems patently ridiculous, how could that possibly make sense? French is a subject–object–verb language. The subject is "I", the object is "you", so how could it be that the object is doing something to the subject?

But a brief foray through English emotional verbs reveals that we should not be throwing too many stones. "I miss you" and "I love you", sure, but "you annoy me", "you upset me", "you inspire me", "you amaze me", "you impress me". If you can don your non-native-speaker hat for a second, how do any of those make sense? We get frustrated at someone, and instead of saying "I havefrustratedfeeling you", we turn it around and say "you frustate me". We force them to have the agency for our emotion.

How do we decide which emotional verbs get the not-my-problem treatment? I assume that reflects our own attitudes towards them. We like to think of ourselves being in the driver's seat for love and hate, but – especially for the negative emotions – we would rather that responsibility lie elsewhere. And imagine if it didn't! We'd have no elegant and snappy way to express an idea like "you offended me", we'd have to settle for "I haveoffendedfeeling you". The emotional nexus of our communications would have to stay centered on our actions and our decisions, with no opportunity to use linguistic tricks to outsource that responsibility to others.

Sounds fairly confronting, but I bet if I was transported to that world, after a while this one wouldn't causemissingfeeling me at all.