"It's reminiscent of what Samuel R. Delany said in his Nebula Award-winning Babel-17 4 about an alien language so powerful its speakers could describe how to build a factory in nine words."

That's not an accurate description, because it's incomplete.
It's not more powerful than human languages; it's better at certain things. That same language needs many words to describe what the word "home" conveys in English -- and that definition doesn't cover everything, just enough for the purposes of a treaty.

Well, sure, and it's temperature-dependent besides. Babel-17 is a very complex book. But I'll stand behind my statement for the purposes of the Vukcevich article -- if I'd wanted to write an article on Babel-17, it would have been a different article!

Now something I'd like to see (or maybe do, time depending) is a comparison of The Einstein Intersection and Fifth Head of Cerberus.