The curious case of how the semantic value of a word can be better in a language without a Latin root or origin

Excerpt from Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

"All languages that derive from Latin form the word "compassion" by combining the prefix "with" (com-) and the root meaning "suffering" (Late Latin, passio).

In other languages - Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish for instance - this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means "feeling" (Czech: sou-cit; Polish: współ-czucie; German: Mit-gefühl; Swedish: med-känsla).

In languages that derive from Latin, "compassion" means: we cannot look on cooly as others suffer; or, we symphathize with those who suffer.

Another word with approximately the same meaning, "pity" (French: pitié; Italian: pièta; etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. "To pity on a woman" means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower than ourselves.

That is why the word "compassion" generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.

In languages that form the word "compassion" not from the root "suffering" but from the root word "feeling," the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult.

The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion - joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit; współczucie; Mitgefühl; medkänsla) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme."

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Coltrane's Compassion can exemplify this well, I think.

In images, the first one that comes to mind is Delacroix's La Liberté Guidant le Peuple, a specific detail: right in the lower half of the painting under Liberty's feet, we see a man, presumably dead, wearing only one sock. I saw this painting yesterday, and the feeling it gave me then was of deep understanding of this man's sensations (thus giving him "real human" status, communicating to the viewer this man's existence as a body, and not just a/another symbol in a painting-- movement in inertia, etc) right before he was killed.

He only has one sock on, and one can guess he didn't choose this. It's a detail that may perhaps appear to be of little consequence but that, to me, means a great deal, because it symbolizes lack of comfort of a very specific type; though one cannot quite call it suffering, it is not difficult to realize that minor but continuous lack of basic comfort-- sometimes of a seemingly banal type-- can come to mean a great deal of discomfort.