6. Why words in one language have none answering in another.
This shows us how it comes to pass that there are
in every language many particular words which cannot be rendered by any one single word of another. For the
several fashions, customs, and manners of one nation, making several combinations of ideas familiar and
necessary in one, which another people have had never an occasion to make, or perhaps so much as take notice of,
names come of course to be annexed to them, to avoid long periphrases in things of daily conversation; and so
they become so many distinct complex ideas in their minds. Thus ὀστρακισμός amongst the Greeks, and
proscriptio amongst the Romans, were words which other languages had no names that exactly answered; because
they stood for complex ideas which were not in the minds of the men of other nations. Where there was no such
custom, there was no notion of any such actions; no use of such combinations of ideas as were united, and, as it
were, tied together, by those terms: and therefore in other countries there were no names for them.