Language and thinking

[heliopausa]

Language affects thought.  I think... the article looked pretty convincing to me.  And I know from experience that it's really hard to see a difference when you don't have the language to identify the difference - or to see it as a real difference anyway, a significant difference, and not just hair-splitting. 

So how is my thinking tilted by the fact that I think in English with its multitudinous tense and moods for verbs?  "Would that he had been jumping!" for example.  Or even "I will have eaten breakfast."  Any ideas as to how thinking might differ in a language that doesn't put such huge emphasis on relative time and mood?  Would it be as straightforward as having a different way to view causality, or the past and the future?

Comments

[pulchritude]

I've always been a believer of this. I can't give examples like the one in that essay, but there are definitely things/concepts in Chinese that don't really translate into English, for example, and I firmly believe that a lack of a word for a concept in a language can often make that concept less likely to be understood or even conceived of in the first place by people who speak only that language.

[autumnia]

I read the article during my lunch hour and thought it was fascinating! The example mentioned about how English and Mandarin speakers differ in their ways of thinking with regards to space and time was a good example for me to understand. I don't speak Mandarin but Cantonese speech patterns are similar in this case, and in the given example, I--as a bilingual thinker/speaker--would actually speak it as a Chinese speaker would even though English has long been my primary (but not my first) language.