There is an academic field of debate that I am now qualified to have an opinion on, but that I am not yet familiar enough with to explain in technical details, so instead I am sketching out my general thoughts on the matter. The debate in question is about language, and translation. The two views are that a language is basically its own complete world, and can only be explained in its own terms, on one hand, or that all languages are basically a translation of an underlying mental grammar to describe the world, a "mentalese" language. As someone who has worked as a English as a Second Language teacher for two years, and have seen people acquire language, I lean more to the second viewpoint. If there wasn't some deeper structure connecting two languages together, my job would be impossible, because there is no way I could teach even passable use of a language. This goes for me as well, living in a Spanish speaking country: if I really had to learn a language from nothing, it would be impossible. Some of this might be that English and Spanish are close enough, as languages, but in general, people's minds seem to be able to connect together two different linguistic structures to a deeper concept.
The question of language, and whether its subjective interpretation can ever be shared between two minds, is the type of question that lends itself to late night fingernail gazing, as long time readers of this site doubtlessly know. Both of the strongest forms of the debate, that either languages are boxes that people can't get out of (the strong version of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis), or that people all think in one way, (or that one language is objectively "correct"), and words are just a superfluous way to communicate "real" thoughts, are both too extreme for pragmatic consideration, as much as they make good thought experiments.
The big practical question for me has to deal with the way people look at other languages, especially language exoticization. There has been, and continues to be, reports of languages being vastly different from English, and while these seemingly exotic grammatical forms are praised, as with much cultural foiling, it is often a backhanded compliment. For example, in Chinese, the words for before and after mean front and rear, so that to a Chinese speaker, we are moving backwards in time. I have read commentators who tried to place this into the idea that Chinese is a society oriented towards the past and tradition, while English speakers think of time as something linear and progressive, which explains our orientation towards science, etcetera. There are many objections to this, but one of the most obvious ones is: English also refers to the past as being in front, and the future as being behind. That is what the words "before" and "after" mean. Although English is additionally confusing, because both the past and the future can be "before" us. Also, after the clock runs down, your time is up. English does a number of confusing and unusual thing with time, including having impossible and unlikely events in the future be referred to as in the past, and with adjectives, using present tense for causes, and past tenses for effects. (The movie is boring, so you are bored: cause comes after effect, apparently). As a language teacher, I have come up with many more examples of non-linear usages of English, that only make sense to us because we are used to them.
Another argument against the idea that grammatical forms trap people's thoughts is that the very nature of language allows people to expand and divide statements indefinitely. If a language lacks a piece of vocabulary or a grammatical form, users of that language can always find a way to express the thought further. For example, some languages have a marker for the proximate object of a sentence. Take the English sentence:
He hit the bag with the stick until it broke.
This sentence is grammatical ambiguous: we don't know which broke, the bag or the stick. In a language with a proximate marker, it might be said as:
He hit the bag with the stick-bo and it broke.
and it would be clear that it was the stick that broke.
But when presented with a grammatical ambiguous sentence, we do not go into
Blue Screen of Death mode like a supercomputer presented
1 the
Cretan paradox by
Captain Kirk. Despite not having a grammatical tool to deal with ambiguous sentences, people can use other tools to work out the meaning, usually with only a moment or two of inconvenience.
I do not think there is anything intrinsic about English, or any other language, that makes it more suited to science and technology. Certainly not that English is more "logical" or "linear", and that a language spoken on the edge of Europe by farmers and fishermen was destined to somehow set itself apart due to some hidden brilliance in its grammar. If there is anything about English that has made it more suitable for progress, it is the opposite of it being logical or linear: it is its adaptability, helped along by the fact that English, unlike most European languages, has no governing bodies to define its "proper" usage, meaning that new technical terms can be adopted much more quickly. There is much more to say about this discussion, both technically and non-technically, but as mentioned, I am sketching this out as informal ideas. I might do some more substantive research on the matter soon.
1: Notice at this point in the sentence, the verb "presented" could be either active or passive. And yet, you figured out the sentence, didn't you? Well, I hope you did...