The words we'll need, and the words we won't

It’s not surprising that hunter-gatherer languages have no words for light-year or billion.

Slightly more unexpected is the near-total lack of a word for one hundred.

It goes even further: Most such languages lack a word for ten, eight, or even five. The Australian aboriginal Warlpiri language has words for one and two, while all higher amounts are simply many. So-called “one-two-many” languages are common among hunter-gatherers for a simple reason: precise counting is rarely necessary. They have not invented terms they do not need.

In 2014, a Warlpiri elder was asked by a BBC documentarian how many grandchildren he had. He replied “many”—then made four tally marks in the sand while reciting their names, answering in effect “one and one and one and one.” 

This particular lexical gap extends to many indigenous peoples around the world, from the Amazon Pirahã to the Kalahari !Kung to the Arapesh of New Guinea. Some hunter-gatherer languages include numbers as high as four or five, but few go beyond that.

It’s not that they are unable to count higher. To refer to a specific number for which their language lacks a word, they might do as the Warlpiri elder did with tallies—one and one and one and one—or use combinations of one and two. The Gumulgal tribe of the Torres Strait Islands has what amounts to a base-two numbering system:

1 is urapon

2 is ukasar

3 is ukasar-urapon

4 is ukasar-ukasar

10 is ukasar-ukasar-ukasar-ukasar-ukasar

The awkwardness of using 15 syllables to indicate the quantity “10” is a good indication that the number 10 is of little common use to the Gumugal. But the point is made: When the Gumugal do need to count to 10, they are fully capable of doing so.

(Agglutinative compounds are not limited to hunter-gatherers. The French word for 97 is quatre-vingt-dix-sept, or “four times twenty plus ten plus seven.” Although why the French would have little use for that number, I have no idea.)

Language is the ever-expanding product of culture, made to facilitate communication about things that matter. No group of people ever stood in a frustrated circle and said, “Look, there’s that common and important thing again. If only we had a word for it.” If a word is needed, a word is created, or borrowed from an existing language, just as gong (Malay) and igloo (Inuit) found their way to English as soon as they were required.

Eskimo snow and Somali camels

Although a casual comment in 1911 by anthropologist Franz Boas about Eskimos having many words for snow turned into an oft-repeated chestnut about cultural differences that makes linguists roll their eyes, the observation points to a genuine feature of language: the nuance it sprouts is the nuance required. It is not surprising that the Somali language includes 46 words for camels of various kinds and conditions—fat camel (gool); young camel (qaalin); old female camel (qawaar); milk-producing camel that is partially milked, with two udders for human consumption and two for its calf (xagjir) —while US English, the majority language of a country where camels exist mostly in picture books, has at most two (camel and dromedary)…and few US readers will recall from elementary school whether “dromedary” signifies one hump or two. (It’s one.) 

Some lexical anomalies are harder to explain. I don't know why the Japanese language spawned a specific word for gazing vacantly into the middle distance (boketto), but the concept itself must resonate with Japanese culture or there wouldn’t be a word for it. Conversely, given the quick adaptability of language, when a word is absent, that's a reliable indication that the concept isn’t important or useful to the culture in question.

Xagjir, that compact Somali word for a camel of a certain kind, required a long string of 18 words for the English equivalent. The technique that allows English speakers (no matter how rarely they need to do so) to designate that partially-milked camel allows the Gumugal (no matter how rarely they need to do so) to count to 10.

There is a continuous process not only of creation but of exile in language. Peruke (an elaborate wig worn by men) chandler (a dealer in household items), and costermonger (a street vendor of produce), all common 150 years ago, have fallen out of usage as each item disappeared from the culture, and terms like gentrify, microaggression, netizen, podcast, social media, and bromance have risen to meet various needs.

Two areas are especially prone to rapid evolution: slang and technology. I'm reminder of the latter when I try to give my predigital mother-in-law tech support over the phone. "Put your cursor over the icon for the app, click to open, then go to the main menu and select the link for your profile" includes eight terms either created or (even worse) repurposed since she turned 60.

Soon it will happen to me, and then — sweet karma — to my children.

Our lexical future

By the end of this century, words like dial, text, drive, mail, rewind, and handwritten are expected to have gone from semantic skeuomorphs to extinction, while other neologisms will have risen in response to need.

We might speak of gravlag, the effects of long-term exposure to different gravity levels while living off-planet, or neurofusion, the act of merging your consciousness with an artificial intelligence, temporarily or permanently.

You might know a veydra or two — people who refuse to participate in virtual reality or augmented existence, choosing only physical-world interactions, or advocate for the preservation of lentive spaces, ecosystems artificially slowed in their metabolism to withstand climate shifts or human intervention ("The lentive forests of Alaska only grow a millimeter a year now, but they’ll survive the next three centuries").

Orynd might describe a deep psychological state of disconnection caused by prolonged interaction with AI that mirrors human behavior too perfectly. Quensting could be the word for deleting unwanted personal memories, a la Eternal Sunshine.

Genetically modified micro-lifeforms called dustkins, engineered to clean pollution and airborne toxins, might be commonly seen floating above cities, and zeitblur might define the disorienting sensation of living in an era where change happens so rapidly that the present feels undefined.

Mindrash might describe confusion and anxiety from absorbing too much augmented reality input, and soulglitch could be the eerie existential feeling that you've slipped into an alternate timeline or that the matrix is showing.

All of these are made up, of course — like all language — but plausible given what we know. Still, just as people of 1925 could never have dreamt up a future word like cryptocurrency, the lexical texture of the future is mostly unknowable. But the principle is real and certain: Every language on Earth will continue to evolve, not just in added and subtracted vocabulary but the phonetic shifts, semantic drift, and changes of usage that make one era unintelligible to another.