Language Affects How We Perceive the World
Humpty Dumpty sat on wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
The verb is "sat" instead of "sit", which shows that in English the verb has to be marked for the tense. In Indonesian, however, there is no need to change the verb (mainly because you can't.) Compare English and Indonesian to Russian, where one would need to mark the tense and the gender. Furthermore, one would have to decide whether Humpty finished sitting or he ended up falling--then of course the verb would change again.
Lera Boroditsky explains in a Wall Street Journal article that the logistics of language can change the way we understand the world. Giving directions, putting events in chronological order, and even establishing causality vary from language to language. The languages we speak become so innate to us that we don't realize how they complicated they can be.
Check out this link for the full article!
This is a great read! Even though certain languages originate from the same root, they vary so much.
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