I agree with everything you said! I have a cat that clearly knows quite a few words as well. But they can never know thousands of words like humans can, unfortunately due to their limited brains. My cat tries to talk too, but her annunciation is terrible because of her cat mouth lol.

I agree with what you say about "taste" in music probably being caused by this same overlap mechanism.

Here's a cat brain picture btw: https://www.catster.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/600px-Catbrain.jpg

You'll notice it doesn't have all the cortex space, so there's no lobes that can overlap in the same way like a human brain. Same goes for almost every other animal. We're lucky to have brains like this, or else we would only be able to know like 1000 words, like a gorilla. Instead we can know tens of thousands, so people can write very detailed descriptions of things that are useful long after the person who wrote them dies. Other animals can't do anything like this. I would love it if cats or dogs developed a reading/writing system, that'd be amazing.