who only by moving can balance

I finally got Translation State (the latest Ann Leckie) onto my ereader last night, and today (when I haven't been asleep) I've been working my way through it.

I am currently part way through Chapter 10 -- no spoilers, please -- but at the beginning of Chapter 6 I had a Revelation.

None of us had names. Names were a thing we had to learn about when we reached the Edges. They’re really just words, just a way to talk about things, but they’re fixed in a way that was terribly unfamiliar to us new Edges, and it took some time before we understood the idea. Like human language itself, actually, which gave everything names and put all those names in fixed arrays of things that belong together. Even if you couldn’t see how they did.

Ohhh, I thought. The Presger speak Haskell. And Much Became Clear...

(Slightly less reductively: this description makes it sound like a key difference between human and Presger language is that the former is object-oriented and the latter is, presumably though we're not actually told this in as many words or haven't been so far, functional.