By contrast, no language loads up nouns in this way. While we hear a lot about how a language spoken by many Inuit, Inuktitut, supposedly has a huge number of words for “snow” (they don’t really have that many, but the Sami of northern Fennoscandia do), it doesn’t get around enough that verbs can express similarly subtle shades of experience. Take southern Thailand, where there are languages that have words — some of them called strange verbs — for as many as 15 varieties of “stink.” In the Jahai language there, one verb means to smell like mushrooms, stale food or a musty crawl space: a brown, hanging, just-short-of-pleasant kind of funk you almost don’t want to wave away.
In Navajo, if you are taking down, say, electrical cords from a high shelf one at a time, you say — this is yet another language in which sentences are often single words —…
