Linguistics caught my fascination, realizing that in natural language lie the metaphors for how we interpret and relate with the world in which we live. After learning Spanish and speaking it for over seven years, I am convinced that our attitudes can be shifted by the nature of our expression, that between the language and the culture there is an undeniable feedback loop, that societies and their language are close reflections of each other. In some languages there is no word for possession or for or Which of course means, that language can be a tool for change.

Regarding vocabulary, if a language lacks a word for a specific concept, it's considerably more difficult to think about the concept or to examine it logically in order to understand it, or to use it for classifying or organizing things. For example, a study of an Amazonian tribe, the Piraha, who don't have words for numbers, suggests that these people have difficulty with numerical concepts in tasks where memory is involved, even though they presumably can recognize differences in size of small collections of things.

In that regard, Edward Sapir wrote: "No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality."

More later...

Interesting Resources:

http://nlp.stanford.edu/