[Brian_K_White]

I think the idea is you don't bother to unless it actually matters in a given situation, and when it does, you just add more words.

Probably writers get this more easily. I think they are trained and edited constantly to avoid unnecessary fluff, and identify what is pointful atmospheric detail and what it pointless detail.

Does the story actually change depending on what drink dad enjoyed with his morning paper? Maybe if it was spiked, or if it was a pointed aspect of his character that he drank chocolate which others find childish, and he knows it and doesn't care. So it could, but in 99% of scenes I don't think it does matter, it only matters that it's a common thing that people do, and a common setting prop. If the language were not English and the standard way to say "morning coffee" was something else instead of specifically coffee, the scenes and stories all function exactly the same.

[aidenn0]

Reminds me of the old meme that a Vanilla Soy Latte is a 3-bean stew.

[esperent]

> I think the idea is you don't bother to unless it actually matters in a given situation, and when it does, you just add more words

Yes I understand that. Vietnamese works a bit like this although with a far less limited vocabulary.

I was asking about the specific case where it does matter. How complicated is it to differentiate between these two similar drinks when the difference is important?

[Brian_K_White]

Probably painfully, like the full real scientific names for chemical compounds and biological species, where there are hudreds or even thousands of variations of things.

I would imagine that in a system like this, you end up adding only the particular extra detail that matters at the time, and so you almost never say quite the same thing as what we mean by "coffee".

Instead it would be just "drink" most of the time (and for all I know maybe even that is too specific and it's really just "liquid" or "liquid food", but anyway...)

And then when you come in from shovelling snow, your partner has "hot drink" ready for you, because "hot" is the extra property that matters.

And when you get up in the morning, you want "invogorating drink" to get going, because "invogorating" is the extra detail that matters. (setting aside that I bet "invogorating" is NOT one of the precious few 120 available words, but there will be something like active or up or positive or fast)

And rarely bother trying to express all the of the bag of properties that "coffee" conveys.

And if you DO once in a while, maybe that is not so different from English anyway.

"a steaming hot mug of black coffee" is a lot of syllables, and we would say all of that in English if we happened to want to express all of those facets, so maybe it's not all that different?