> Your time traveling Roman asking for the portal rather than the door has basically just invented his own dialect, not learned English to any meaningful degree

> Your time traveling Roman asking for the portal rather than the door has basically just invented his own dialect, not learned English to any meaningful degree. A fun argument for how important this is: The only reason we have Middle Earth, Lord of The Rings, etc is because Tolkien needed a world and a history to embed his languages in. Otherwise they couldn’t have any real meaning. He could construct the grammar, yes, but not the semantics. Even something as simple as what our shortest words encode tells a lot about our culture or history. We use short words for things we say often.