I finally gave up and decided that treating each concept in isolation (for the purpose of dictionary building)
What do you mean with that sentence? That you want to use the ontology of naive English?
If we would have a name for 75 that's isolated from the name for other numbers it would be quite hard to do math.
Ordering enities into categories provides the possibility to systematize them instead of making everything a special case. If you look at Lojban's place system is a huge mess because it has specific rules for the places of every single gismu.
When it comes to feelings, I think the distinction of feelings/emotions/moods and physical sensations (pain/warmth etc) is highly useful. It makes a language more difficult to learn to have more distinctions but it makes the language more functional. A person gains something when they learn it.
I'm working on a conlang (constructed language) and would like some input from the Less Wrong community. One of the goals is to investigate the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis regarding language affecting cognition. Does anyone here have any ideas regarding linguistic mechanisms that would encourage more rational thinking, apart from those that are present in the oft-discussed conlangs e-prime, loglan, and its offshoot lojban? Or perhaps mechanisms that are used in one of those conlangs, but might be buried too deeply for a person such as myself, who only has superficial knowledge about them, to have recognized? Any input is welcomed, from other conlangs to crazy ideas.