Hello JMJ
I think you have raised an excellent question here.
If I may be allowed to paraphrase you, it seems to me that you are asking:
"How does the structure of a specific language affect our ability to conceptualize, understand, or even to model Reality?"
I've been involved in a similar discussion at
What is Reality?. You might want to take a peek at that to see if anything there corresponds to your inquiry.
I would tend to agree with your premise. Language comprises the "building blocks" with which we construct our internal model of Reality. Make a big enough change in the Language, and you may find that some concepts are no longer easily expressed. And if you can't express them, what makes you think you can understand them?
I'm reminded of a book by Daniel C. Dennett, called "
Freedom Evolves". His point was that there's this word, "freedom", and we have analogs for that English word in all languages, even those dating back thousands of years. And yet those ancient people had a completely different meaning or understanding. For example, in ancient Hebrew, "freedom" meant the state of
not being a slave. Period. Their ancient language, at that time, evolved to reflect their cultural history (as all languages are), simply did not have enough words, associations, events, experiences or sub-concepts required to construct OUR concept of "freedom".
If you went to an extreme, and chose a 1000-word language consisting of only 200 common verbs (each with only three tenses) , 390 common nouns, and 10 prepositions, it would be pretty obvious that sophisticated concept-building was out of the question. In fact, you might not even be able to construct the meaning: "out of the question"!!
