http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/15/language-cultural-daniel-everett-review

For instance, in Spanish the simple future is – in its peninsular variety – indeed expressed through an ending marker: yo como, I eat; yo comeré, I will/shall eat. But in the South Cone (more precisely River Plate) variety, it’s commonly expressed as: “voy a comer”. To say “comeré” in my part of the Continent, sounds affected and foreign. Speak like that and probably you’ll get asked where you are from (and maybe elicit a smile or two). So, the future is expressed via a construction “voy (ir=go in the PRESENT tense) +a + infinitive). Where is the ending-marker for the future here, pray? So here we have an instance that cancels that conclusion. Also, what about markers indicating past? Why are only the markers for future indicative of a people’s character?

As to the “accountability” notion, which has been commented for Italy. Spanish doesn’t have an exact word for this notion either, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’ have a translation for it that expresses the notion. Also in Spanish we have the word “responsabilidad”, which has been argued as not being the same as “accountability”. Not in and by itself, it isn’t; but the expression “responder ante” pretty much expresses the meaning: “Pedro es el responsable del Departamento de Policía y responde ante el Ministro del Interior”. There: Pedro is the responsible party for the Police Department and accountable to, or before, the Minister of the Interior”. You may even use other words for it: “debe dar cuenta de sus actos” is to be accountable for your actions. So you see, maybe you use more words (romance languages are wordier than English, a known fact) but the notions are there.

Just wanted to contribute my two cents on two points which were widely and more knowingly discussed by other readers.

However, the “straw man” position has in the past been taken as a serious scientific hypothesis. More to the point, it persists today in people’s everyday ideas about language, and also, very commonly in the media. The goal of the article was not to specifically provide a review of Chen’s findings, but to put these findings into a broader context for the general reader. (As noted in previous comments, more detailed scholarly remarks on the paper can be found in the various discussions on Language Log). And that broader context, in my opinion, leads to the conclusion that it would be surprising if in fact grammatical differences were at the heart of the very large behavioral differences that Chen reports.

So, my objection is that that *this* fallacy (mistaking correlation for causation) is no reason to be generally suspicious of research into the complex interplay of language and cognition.

Refuting that hypothesis is easy; but it’s a straw man attack. The claim has never been that language draws a neat box around what people can describe and imagine, but rather that it helps to shape our cognitive habits — our perceptions, assumptions, associations, and priorities. Further, the claim (at least, among responsible scholars) has never been that the relationship is casually linear; language is dynamically shaped, in turn, by the shifting concerns and associative habits of speaker-populations. Linguistic difference, whatever the directions of causal interplay, illuminate different ways of inhabiting the world. Granted, some writers may exaggerate these differences; but a scholarly interest in this difference does not merit dismissive ridicule.

For intriguing discussion, see this alternative discussion: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html