I think a fairer comparison would be Toki Pona, a micro-language with ~120 words. you can express lots of things if you have a great deal of patience, Up-Goer F

I think a fairer comparison would be Toki Pona, a micro-language with ~120 words. you can express lots of things if you have a great deal of patience, Up-Goer Five style. In logic there's also SKI combinator calculus, which is Turing-complete with three symbols, and unlike the Morse or A-Z examples, but like the Toki Pona example, each symbol has a semantic meaning. If you just want to describe ideas in an abstract realm like sequences of colors, like this paper, it's not surprising you don't need many words.