As such, it would be quite interesting to see some kind of quantitative judgment on the matter of which language has more or (less/fewer) ambiguous words.
A pig is not a pork.
A rain-forest is humid but not dank, a cellar may be dank.
Food is moist, not damp, etc etc.
These words have reason to exist and have particular usages.
No, but it is pork (while pork is most often used for meat, it can be used for live pigs, especially those destined for meat, and structurally differs from “pig” in such use largely in that it is a mass, rather than countable, noun.)
> A rain-forest is humid but not dank
A rainforest absolutely can be dank, as well as merely humid.
> These words have reason to exist and have particular usages
While that's true, the particular current usages aren't the historical reason they exist in many cases, it's just a result of how overlapping meanings have shaken out to be more (but not completely) distinct over time.
(And before you retort with 'but those are grammatically important!' Let me say yes, I agree, they are, and because you live within the language, you implicitly understand why. Let's just say that as an English speaker, I feel the same way about English's tendency to have a million synonyms for everything. Each one has its own, distinct flavor, and such aggressive vocabulary theft* is a fundamental part of English's charm.)
* “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
― James D. Nicoll