Everyday words, such as ‘red’, ‘sad’, ‘house’, ‘run’ and ‘sister’, may strike us as denoting concepts that exist independently of any language. In a traditional view, words such as these map onto ...

Detail from Tacuinum Sanitatis, a 14th-century handbook of medieval health. The naming process, the act of naming the items of the world, is as old as the first words spoken by our ancestors. We can ...