"Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a…
Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) change the verb to mark tense.

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you'd use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you'd use a different form.

Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?"

The answer is yes.

In a world of sharing ideas across languages, understanding how and why languages make us think, behave and reason differently from each other is increasingly important.

"All this new research shows us that the languages we speak not only reflect or express our thoughts, but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express.
The structures that exist in our languages profoundly shape how we construct reality, and help make us as smart and sophisticated as we are."

« Watch Lera Boroditsky's talk. Lera Boroditsky is an associate professor of cognitive science at University of California San Diego and editor in chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. She previously served on the faculty at MIT and at Stanford. Her research is on the relationships between mind, world and language (or how humans get so smart).

She once used the Indonesian exclusive "we" correctly before breakfast and was proud of herself about it all day. »

https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think

The quotes above are from her 2010 Wall Street Journal article Lost in Translation:

http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/wsj.pdf

Also read:

The myth of language universals: language diversity and its importance for cognitive science
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19857320/