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Comment by ars

Yes, but the difference is not the language, but the words. The complexity of the words.

A single word can hold a large amount of meaning, but to the brain that single word uses the same "storage" and any other word.

So by having many complex words a person can think more "efficiently".

This is why many fields have jargon - the jargon helps the thinking process, by essentially acting like file compression - you compress an entire concept into a single word, and you can now think about some big complicated thing by using a single word.

This is also why language have so MANY words. English has something like half a million of them. Yet it would be totally possible to replace the vast majority of them with simpler, but more, words.

But doing so has drawbacks to thinking ability.

parent ars 16 years ago

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