I think that the base argument - Popper's view vs Whorf's - is about as easily resolved as nature vs nurture or whether ontogeny really does recapitulate phylogeny.
I'm pretty sure there's a link between the language one speaks and the way (the order) in which one thinks. I believe that one of the reasons why native English speakers (i.e. people whose first language is English) are so direct is that in English the verb is always closely associated with its subject and is never far removed from the object, either. The order is usually subject - verb- object, so we are used to saying that "Jack loves Jill". If we spoke in other languages the options might be "Jill Jack loves" or even "loves Jill Jack". The English approach has obviously arisen from pragmatism. Assuming that Romance languages and English are pretty similar in this respect, the same would be true of most southern European and some eastern European language speakers.
Languages such as German, where word order is often paramount such as in the usage of the future tense, must impose a different mode of thinking on people who use those languages. I don't know and can't pretend to guess exactly in what way it would be different, but maybe Wsieber can tell us if I'm right or not.
Languages which have evolved different forms for different purposes - high Mandarin or the Japanese "kudasai" forms come to mind here - would seem to have a whole mindset behind them.
The inexactness of language is a barrier, of course. You can describe something very exactly - "A hill that is 100 feet high, with a house halfway up it with white wooden walls and a red roof, with a field of wheat stretching down to the road from the house, and with trees with bright green foliage on the crest". This is a pretty full description as these things go. But any two people will interpret the description differently, and will add and subtract from the picture mentally derived from the words based on the individual's past experience and future expectations. Word pictures, even between fluent speakers of the same language, are at worst surreal and at best impressionistic. But between speakers of two different languages they may well be best described as minimalist abstract representations. Each of the terms in the sentence above may have a completely different "meaning" in each of the languages the description is translated into.
My tuppence worth, anyway!
- Pfranz
