[voldacar]

>As others have said, the usage of similar words is no convincing evidence for homogenized ideas

I disagree. Words are used to convey ideas, so if the space of words is shrinking, one should assume that the space of ideas is shrinking. It's possible for this not to be the case, but if word-space is shrinking then the burden of proof should be on those who claim that idea-space is not shrinking.

Maybe we could use embeddings / nlp analysis to determine whether idea-space is shrinking. Or just get a bunch of people to read abstracts from different time-periods and rate how similar they are to one another in their semantic content.

[beecafe]

Words are like letters making up ideas, not ideas themselves. Having more than 26 letters wouldn't make us more expressive, and having fewer (like many extant languages)... wouldn't make us any less.