Thoughts on language.
Years ago, the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf claimed that the language we speak dictates how we perceive reality. He based this hypothesis on his observation that Native American tribes in the American Southwest had no words for units of time, e.g. hours.
But their culture had no need to divide a day into hours, so there were no terms for such time divisions. Therefore, Whorf concluded that the people he was dealing with had no concept of time. This outlook was perpetuated in the notion of "Indian time," which held that a person would arrive when he arrived, whenever that was. But European agrarian societies in the Middle Ages worked pretty much the same way, until the advent of manufacturing and the construction of clocks in village church towers, which served to call the workers to their workplaces at specific times of the day, so they could all begin their chores at once.
Better to say that language describes, not dictates, our perception of reality. For example, American culture and the English language divides a rainbow into seven basic colors. We actually perceive more, but we use additional words for various shades. The color spectrum is continuous, and any division of it is arbitrary. Different cultures divide the visible spectrum in various ways. We happen to have seven; other languages have fewer.
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