I had a multilingual grad student enamored of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis. He was absent the day we discussed it in class, with the typically critical attitude we tend to take. The students, perhaps taking their cue from me, were quite harsh with Whorf. My absent student wrote a paper defending the hypothesis. I gave him a good grade, but I wasn't convinced. His arguments tended to consist of colorful examples of the hypothesis, which anyone can accumulate. "In Russian they say.... " He wasn't arguing against the strong arguments against it, but adducing evidence. But nobody denies that we can find colorful things in language that imply an understanding of the world, if seen from a particular angle.
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It's very elementary. I liked the idea when I was a small child but by the time I got to college it didn't seem very sophisticated IF you knew some languages.
I do think, know, remember, that the acquisition of language, and a language, does something permanent to your brain. I remember it happening to me. I knew I was losing contact with a great world, and getting in exchange a very sharp analytical instrument that was getting honed to my particular environment. The particular environment was English with some Spanish vocabulary to vary it. I knew my version of language had a slightly different mentality than the other language did, but the main difference wasn't that, it was the loss of the older world, and the amazing sharpness of the new instrument.
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