When a language originates from a place that lacks a certain feature or doesn't experience a certain phenomenon, it sensibly has no words for things it doesn't need. (Sometimes they also HAVE words for stuff it never occurred to you that you WOULD need--I'm reasonably certain there's a word in Finnish or Swedish or something for 'the state of being reluctant to write letters'.) Naturally the languages that are born in desert climates don't have a word for 'snow' or 'ice' because, well, they never have a need for it. So when people from the areas where these languages dominate and encounter for the first time things for which their native tongue has no words, the normal mode of operation is just to usurp a word from the local language. New words are recently very rarely just created out of nowhere.
But the invading Vikings that poured into England had to take some pretty startlingly basic words from the local language because theirs lacked the appropriate terms. It says a lot about just how poor and desperate your people are if your language has no room for words like 'trunk'.
Also: as I've mentioned, I'm usually really good at coming up with names. Mostly I do people names and place names are a little harder, so whenever I come up with a good fictional place-name, I tend to store it in case I ever need it. One of my favourites is rather an exotic flavour name and I've never had the right time or place to use it.
The name is 'Tel Azo'.
I took it from my car's license plate--not verbatim, naturally. I simply converted a couple of numbers into similar-looking letters. Let you decide which were numbers first.
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