Naming things makes them easier to distinguish, see the Wharfian Hypothesis [1] (which has been validated experimentally). For example, if you don't have diffe

Naming things makes them easier to distinguish, see the Wharfian Hypothesis [1] (which has been validated experimentally). For example, if you don't have different words for blue and green (which is the case for some languages), then it's harder (slower) to distinguish distinct color samples that are blue and green than if you had words for the different colors. If you're an Inuit, and you have words for different kinds of snow, it's going to be easier to disambiguate them, as you have a mental anchor (the name) for each concept. In programming terms, I think there's a meaningful analogy with heap vs. dictionary lookups, with words allowing more efficient retrieval of unrelated concepts. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity