I am pretty sure you have at least once seen a pair of disputing persons, speaking the same mother tongue, each of them unable to grasp what the other says. In contrast, two professionals in the same field may feel quite comfortable with understanding each other, even if they only know a few popular words in the other partner's language.
Language is a reflection of life, of the realities that people have to live with, day after day.
I spent two years in Europe and my experience convinced me that understanding others is next to impossible, if one has no idea of how those people live. It is not my goal here to discuss whether and to what extent the belief was right and wrong, but it certainly has been an important part of our mentality. So, I translated the article into Russian and showed it to a number of artists I knew, and also asked them to answer a few questions. The questions were not directly derived from the article, but rather questioned their understanding of artists from Western countries. The questions and the answers given by the majority of respondents are presented in the following table.