More interesting and relevant here, I believe, would be a reversed effect -- does watching spiders turn people into arachnophobes? It seems rather unlikely.
But what happens when a person equipped with only, say, english comes into contact the concepts that those untranslatable words put a label on? If there's a void in the language, it gets filled by a new word or by the expansion or change of an old word. The words that are unique to one language represent concepts that just don't have a good label yet, not some utterly alien concept that people of other cultures are unable to ever understand. Go and live with Inuits and you too will learn those hundred words for snow they have (if you hurry before it all melts, that is).
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More interesting and relevant here, I believe, would be a reversed effect -- does watching spiders turn people into arachnophobes? It seems rather unlikely.
The Weighted Companion Cube isn't lifeless!
It speaks to me.
But what happens when a person equipped with only, say, english comes into contact the concepts that those untranslatable words put a label on? If there's a void in the language, it gets filled by a new word or by the expansion or change of an old word. The words that are unique to one language represent concepts that just don't have a good label yet, not some utterly alien concept that people of other cultures are unable to ever understand. Go and live with Inuits and you too will learn those hundred words for snow they have (if you hurry before it all melts, that is).