language is culture - or so i said today. interestingly enough, a friend of mine blogged about the same thing today as well, and i've just read it. he quotes the sapir-whorf hypothesis; a portion from a site i quote here:

(note: the hypothesis has two basic principles, linguistic determinism and relativity)

"linguistic determinism refers to the idea that the language we use to some extent determines the way in which we view and think about the world around us... linguistic relativity states that distinctions encoded in one language are unique to that language alone, and that 'there is no limit to the structural diversity of languages'..."