I'm in a pickle. I think I understand something about language and thought, and if I'm even kinda right (and I don't see how I could be wrong), then I can shape a lot of my discussions of language design arround this. But I need to a) find reference material to determine if my idea carrys water, and b) create a concise monologue for delivering it.

The concise conjecture is that cognitive search cost (the cost of searching for ideas near a given starting idea) is a function of the relative linguistic distance (the edit distance between the structural forms of two expressions), and not the relative semantic distance (the true or deep structure distance between two ideas) of the statements involved. This conjecture is based upon the further conjecture that language formation facilitates reasoning by providing abstractions above deep structure, and that while these abstractions permit faster cognitive manipulations, they are incapable of providing bias free representations of their respective deep structure systems.

If we accept these conjectures, we may conclude that, for a given domain of expression, languages in which the linguistic distance between two average statements is proportional to the semantic distance between those statements will place a less distorting bias upon cognitive manipulations within the domain those in which there is less of a proportional relationship between the linguistic and semantic distances.