> So when you learn a new concept via language, it can have a dramatic effect on your life. But whether you learn it in English or Russian isn't going to make a huge difference, because they aren't that different in terms of what they can express easily.

But what if it's between very different languages like English and Hopi, or some tribal tongue from the depths of the Amazon?

Russian and English have quite a lot of cultural mixing. The strong claims I or hear are that some tribe has no concept of time or counting, or that the Ancient Greeks didn't have a word for blue, and thus Homer talked about the sea being the color of blood wine, or whatever it was.

A really interesting one that I only vaguely recall is a tribe that always specified the direction they were coming from when meeting someone. An anthropologist studying them had to learn to be able to always know what direction, and she claimed that eventually she acquired something like a bird's eye view in her mind of the area in order to accomplish that. Which was second nature to the natives. Not that it was mystical, but just some mental ability to conceptualize direction from a different perspective.