system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why some languages like English and French have a word for "evening" and others, like Portuguese and Spanish, don't, using a later division for the night called "madrugada" that starts after midnight?

Basically, evening is an ideia that doesn't exist in Portuguese or Spanish, since the night for people from these cultures start right after the sunset. But they have a later division of time that starts around midnight, called "madrugada" in both languages, that doesn't exist in French or English, for instance. 

Why is time divided differently in such cultures?
gpt
Languages are *anisomorphic*. This means they divide up their semantic space in ways that don't completely overlap. As you know from your own personal experience, different people divide time up differently: is 5 p.m. late afternoon or early evening? Is 4:30 a.m. late at night or early in the morning? At what point does evening turn into night? So given that the perception of time can vary even within a community of speakers, and given that languages encode the realities of their speakers differently, we should not be surprised that different languages, even those in close proximity, should divide up the parts of day differently. There is not necessarily a 'reason' for this. It's just an accident of history.