If people speak more than one language, is what they know different in each language? Does each language provide a different framework for reality?
In some ways, what people who speak more than one language know is in fact different in each language. For example, in my SL Latin class, the other day my Latin teacher taught us a new saying "do ut des" which in Latin means "I give to you so you give to me" and is used in the Aeneid in Book 4 to say that Iarbus did a lot of work to make Jupiter happy, but Jupiter did nothing in return resulting in Aeneas ending up with Dido instead of Iarbus ending up with Dido. In English, this saying would mean "I give so as you give" which could mean the exact same thing as it did in the sense that it did in the Aeneid, but it also could mean something completely different. As Americans, some people feel very strongly about karma, and I am one of those people. I know that I am someone who tries to do really good things in life so that I won't have bad karma. The way I take the quote "do ut des" is that I do good for others so that the world will be good to me so it can be taken differently than the way ancient authors took it.
Language can absolutely provide a different framework for reality. I know a lot of people that came to Cape Cod directly from Brazil, so their native language is Portuguese. When kids come over from Brazil, they take an English class to learn the language. This can make it very difficult for them to have to learn to adjust to how the language works. Learning English can be difficult because of the amount of idioms that we have in our language and a lot of people who are not native speakers have trouble picking up anything that is not literally translated. On the other hand though, when they go back home, the kids typically go home to speaking their native language. A lot of my friends speak Portuguese at home and when they are at home they understand their surroundings much better than they do when at school where everyone around them speaks a language that they have not yet adapted to. This can happen in any language. Every culture has different types of language that they speak. For instance, in Nicaragua, the way they speak Spanish is different from the Spanish spoken in Spain because of the culture they are surrounded by. Should someone from Nicaragua go to Spain, or vise versa, the Spanish they are speaking could easily get lost in translation because their cultures differ so they have differing idioms and understand different concepts in different ways.
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