Language Influencing Culture

I found this article from the WSJ in Editor's Picks in my iPhone app, Instapaper. Fascinating stuff. I've always loved languages and noticing their similarities/differences and how they influence thinking.

In addition to space and time, languages also shape how we understand causality. For example, English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. English speakers tend to say things like "John broke the vase" even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would be more likely to say "the vase broke itself." Such differences between languages have profound consequences for how their speakers understand events, construct notions of causality and agency, what they remember as eyewitnesses and how much they blame and punish others.