Abstruse verbiage

The study of language in written historical sources can tell us a lot about a culture, not just directly in how it is at any particular time, but also for how its changes affect a society's intellectual toolkit. In particular, it turns out to matter a lot which relations and processes are routinely thought about as things with characteristics of their own, and which can be discussed only as characteristics of other things. For example, it's a lot easier to say "addition is commutative" than to have to spell it out as a property of numbers, and it's harder still if you can't talk about numbers as existing independently of particular collections of things. One of the interesting findings of intellectual history is that, when a society is gaining new ways of solving problems and undergoing an upheaval in how people think, circumlocutions that have been around longer are replaced with new nouns first, then more and more recent ones, until explicit ways of talking about abstract entities have caught up with what's being discussed indirectly. This observation is encapsulated in a saying: ontology recapitulates philology.