Comment by pattisapu

Is there something special about loading complexity into the level of the sentence as opposed to individual words?

Agglutination in many Native American languages and compounding in many Indo-European languages come to mind as examples where interesting nesting and complex relational structures can be found at the level of the word.

The article suggests that speakers of English or German can do "mental arithmetic" whereas speakers of Ket have lots of "math facts." I don't know anything about Ket, but German, Sanskrit, and other languages seem to have a lot in the way of mental arithmetic when it comes to making up long compound words, which are not such a static or stable currency as in, say, English.