A Valentine’s Day Salute to the Many Names of Love : Education: Students from diverse backgrounds contribute to a holiday display at John Burroughs High in Burbank.

Love is a multilingual thing.

That’s what a Burbank school librarian learned when she started assembling an unusual Valentine’s Day display that reflects the growing ethnic diversity on campus.

Judy Trapenberg, librarian at John Burroughs High School, persuaded students and staff members representing more than two dozen nations to contribute cards that say love in their native language. The cards, in languages as exotic as Norwegian, Amharic, Sri Lankan and Yiddish, became part of a holiday bulletin board.

“I just wanted to do something with the word love because we have so many people here from all over the world,” Trapenberg said.

The librarian said she could easily have found the foreign words by consulting friends or reference books. “But that’s not the point,” she said. “I preferred to go to the students. I think there’s a feeling they’re contributing. A lot of them are newcomers.”

Ironically, many of the nations represented on the Valentine’s display do not celebrate the holiday.

The multicultural project was inspired by a television show rooted in middle-class American nostalgia. A few weeks ago, Trapenberg said, ABC’s “The Wonder Years” visited the Burroughs library to film part of its Valentine’s Day episode, slated to air Tuesday.

The crew left behind some valentine cards, and Trapenberg used them to decorate a library bulletin board. She decided to add some pink index cards with love written in several languages. “We started out real simple,” she said. “I thought we’d just do Spanish and French. But we got into so many conversations with students at lunch. We realized we had one from West Germany and some from Eastern Europe.”

To gather additional “love cards,” Trapenberg approached students from other nations in the library and sought contributions through a bulletin distributed to Burroughs teachers.

Ari Mosisoglu, 16, provided cards showing the Armenian and Turkish words for love, which sound like sir and ashk . However, it was not love, but war between the Turks and his fellow Armenians that led Mosisoglu’s family to relocate to the United States four years ago. “I like it better here,” he said.

Zsolt Varadi, 15, whose family arrived from Eastern Europe in 1976, provided the Hungarian word for love. After he relocated, his American classmates began calling him “Zsolt, the lightning bolt.”

“I got used to it,” he said. “So it’s cool now.”

Shereen Nocom, 18, whose family is Chinese, and Shino Miwa, 18, from Japan, both said the word for love in their languages might be written as ai in English. But they said the word is pronounced a bit differently in each culture.

During the 1988-89 school year Burroughs had 141 students with limited English-speaking ability, Assistant Principal Maryle Emmett said. An additional 286 spoke fluent English at school but said another language was spoken at home.

Although the second language was often Spanish, some Burroughs students listed Croatian, Mandarin and Persian. Altogether, Burroughs has about 1,200 students.

Trapenberg said some foreign-born students who speak different dialects within the same language have debated the spelling on the valentine cards representing their nation.

Students being students, Trapenberg realized that even a love-inspired project was not totally risk-free. So she had students check one another’s contributions and said she is reasonably sure no one slipped a foreign obscenity among the love cards. “I think I probably would have heard some giggles,” she said.