This paper shows that Jahai are capable of "olfactory abstraction" but I don't see how that says anything about the respective languages. I mean the last senten

This paper shows that Jahai are capable of "olfactory abstraction" but I don't see how that says anything about the respective languages. I mean the last sentence: >The greater ease of linguistic expression demonstrated by the Jahai is not unique, however. It appears that hunter-gatherer communities in particular find odours easier to talk about. If that's true that probably means that they have a greater need to express these concepts and as such have become better at it and developed a specific jargon. Maybe if they tried with tulips or windmills they'd find that the Dutch are much better able to describe them succinctly. Besides the paper says that the Dutch subjects are urban dwellers while the "All Jahai still pursue traditional foraging, although they reside in a resettlement village much of the time, and so are exposed to modernity". Attributing the results solely to linguistic differences would be rather bold (and the paper doesn't in fact do that as far as I can tell> So if you're saying "culture which have a lot of exposition to X and often need to precisely talk about X develop linguistic tools to do it efficiently" then yeah, that seems fairly uncontroversial. Just look at any HN technical discussion about "bugs", "segfaults", "DDOS" or "transpilers". I still don't think it makes a good case for comparing entire languages as a whole.