And then the Orange fruit is introduced, and the language gains the word orange, and all those who speak that language begin to perceive color differently because now they have a word for a hue that they didn't previously have a word for, and that causes them to perceive that hue as a distinct color for the first time.
Just like, if you don't have the background to understand an adhoc private joke, having later some full length explanation will not necessarily make you laugh as you might have if you had these information upstream. In case of translation, your lake of information might be the whole cultural frame that encompasses the language.
This word is akin to that, maybe not entirely the same, but in that culture clearly there was a context that enabled a word to be created for it.
There is a middle ground, people with other languages can and do think in other ways habitually.
“Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.”
~ Roman Jakobson
In the natural ebb and flow of day to day conversation gendered languages (French, German, etc) impel people to convey the gender of neighbours that they discuss, English doesn't.
if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about. [1]
The more extreme example is:
a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply “natural.”
In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects.
Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.”
Excerpt: https://www.npr.org/2009/12/23/121515579/excerpt-dont-sleep-...
I was born in the early 1960s and spent much of my childhood in areas around the Wallace Line in and out of Australia with a family running logistic support for Western scientists ( US, French, British, Dutch, et al ) all wanting a piece of the last remnants of the Noble Savage (heavy ironic quotes about an over abused notion of yore) .. I played a lot with kids my age that spoke what are now very nearly dead languages.
People are people in some deep universal sense, at the same time people with very different cultures and languages can and do think and see the world in very different ways.
The greatest difference that's perhaps most relevant today is that people who live directly from the land have a much better eye for the health and wellbeing of that land and a deeper sense of stewardship for the benefit of all and those to come.