Not just language, but things like visual perception of colour as well. We don't perceive things as a continuum, we perceive discrete colours. This phenomena ap

Not just language, but things like visual perception of colour as well. We don't perceive things as a continuum, we perceive discrete colours. This phenomena applies to tons of different things. We're literally not wired to perceive things without discretely categorizing them first. In psycholinguistics it's called categorical perception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_perception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_perception