Language Miniatures No. 17 mentioned a language with many past-tense forms depending on how long before today things happened, and Miniature No. 20 showed how in Navajo, most nouns denoting objects are really verb phrases. People are invariably intrigued by the unexpectedly different ways in which languages around the world perceive and talk about reality and human experience. Like any distinction we initially perceive as artificial, it probably took you a little time before you learned to see it through that language's lens.
Swahili nouns fall into several classes, identifiable by their initial consonants.
The question of the extent to which languages structure the perception of their speakers has been debated at length for many years. The idea was forcefully argued and presented back in the '30s and '40s by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, whose names are permanently associated with the idea in its purest form. It is a striking idea that exercises a strong hold on the imagination, but in all the years of this debate, the countless attempts to show a connection have all fallen short or been uncomfortably circular. But it has never been convincingly shown that just because the grammar of one's language uses its nouns, verbs and the like in a certain way, our thought is restricted to just that way of perceiving the world .