Four syllables and two or three words versus a single phoneme or kanji tells you something about relative priorities, though...
If a culture has a word for cat which is "owl face bat ear dog" or something, sure it's got cats, but we can intuit that they're a less central concept to that culture than bats, owls or dogs.
> Having a word for it vs being able to describe it. I'd argue the first suggests greater importance.
That's not universal though. Some languages like Japanese, German, & Inuit are synthetic, so a "word" may be more like a compound phrase in an analytic language. So "having a word for it" can be identical to "being able to describe it". In this case it's a particularly short word, so your point is otherwise valid. I'd say that it's probably more "low Kolmogorov complexity vs high Kolmogorov complexity" of the word or phrase that matters. Concepts expressable with lower-complexity words or phrases are likely more common & thus more culturally important than those requiring high-complexity words or phrases.
Four syllables and two or three words versus a single phoneme or kanji tells you something about relative priorities, though...
If a culture has a word for cat which is "owl face bat ear dog" or something, sure it's got cats, but we can intuit that they're a less central concept to that culture than bats, owls or dogs.
Having a word for it vs being able to describe it. I'd argue the first suggests greater importance.
The main difference regards the emphasis/value placed on it. In Japanese culture the space between:
> often (holds) as much importance as the rest of an artwork
This is a great read, with examples (namely gardens and theaters):
https://web.archive.org/web/20241127041031/https://deeperjap...
> Having a word for it vs being able to describe it. I'd argue the first suggests greater importance.
That's not universal though. Some languages like Japanese, German, & Inuit are synthetic, so a "word" may be more like a compound phrase in an analytic language. So "having a word for it" can be identical to "being able to describe it". In this case it's a particularly short word, so your point is otherwise valid. I'd say that it's probably more "low Kolmogorov complexity vs high Kolmogorov complexity" of the word or phrase that matters. Concepts expressable with lower-complexity words or phrases are likely more common & thus more culturally important than those requiring high-complexity words or phrases.