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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9614595" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Sure, though I can go a step further: There is a story (I fear I forget its title!) where the government doesn't even just forbid specific words like Oceania does in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it literally forbids personal expression of any kind. The only things anyone is allowed to express in public are quotes from officially-sanctioned government texts. Yet even in such an oppressive context, people are still able to express subversive messages by selectively quoting various passages that contrast or conflict with one another in ways that highlight issues. It's certainly a lot harder than if you could just choose whatever words you want! But it's a demonstration of how even when not just vocabulary but diction has been made fixed and unchanging, people can still express themselves.But yes, you're correct that having a defined term often helps us skip over needless reduplication. It's why, for example, English has pronouns. I once explained the value of pronouns to someone by expressing a full English paragraph (about the producer/director of an MMO I play) where I never once used he/him, exclusively using the man's name. It was really, really obviously clunky and unnatural and weird.Now, I do think Max has some point, but there was a much, much, much better term he should've used, rather than talking about light.Zero. Zero is a thing that it took us centuries to "discover" (more accurately, to name and start using), because of the way mathematics originally developed. TL;DR (because it really was way too long), our understanding of math was shaped by accountants and ancient Greeks, both of whom viewed "numbers" as representing amounts of something, be it counts of cattle or distances drawn or whatever else. A "line" that has no length isn't a line, so nobody even considered the idea of zero, at least in Greece and Rome. When the idea finally came to Europe from India, it was extremely controversial; now, obviously, it's seen as trivial.But even in the absence of the word "zero", people could still understand the concept of things like absence and lack. People could understand the idea of being ten pennies short of the full price of something, or of checking a stable and finding an empty stall (meaning, a stall with no horses--"zero"horses--inside). They just wouldn't have applied all the same ideas of number that we do today. Which is really all that the soft Sapir-Whorf hypothesis gets us: the words we use affect how we think about things. Which, I mean, of course they do! But it's not true that a society of people who never encounter absences could not ever come up with the number 0, just as it's not true that a society where light is ultra-abundant couldn't come up with the concept of darkness. It would just be an abstract development until something made it concrete. Plenty of things have worked that way IRL.</blockquote>

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