This. My native language is Spain's Spanish and one of the things that shocked me about the Anglo worldview (when I was proficient enough to realise it) is the

This. My native language is Spain's Spanish and one of the things that shocked me about the Anglo worldview (when I was proficient enough to realise it) is the fact that things do happen because of a grammatical agent all the time (BTW, worldview comes from Weltanschauung, it's actually nice having German around). This makes intentional any unintentional action for all intents and purposes. Then you start to understand the preposterous plots in some movies, e.g. as a result of an accident someone dies, then it comes consequent revenge because someone "killed" them, no matter any hopeless "but it was an accident!". You can imagine the moral and political implications, and the friction between cultures as well. I guess you can't translate grammar... or even grasp the alternatives without learning another language. And then there are the terms/concepts/ideas particular of a language or their lack thereof. I learnt from a Borges essay, Ancient Germanic Literatures, about the Ulfilas/Wulfila Bible. As I don't have the English translation of this book (and there's no excerpt in Google Books), I'll try to translate Borges (but not his semicolons) myself: "The Gothic Bible is the oldest monument of the Germanic Languages. Wulfila had to overcome vast difficulties; the Bible more than a book, is a literature; to reproduce that literature, sometimes complex and abstruse, in a warriors and sheperds dialect is a job that would look impossible a priori. Wulfila achieved it with pluck and sometimes with sharp wit. As is natural, he lavished barbarisms and neologisms on it; he had to civilise the language. It holds surprises for the reader. It is written in The Mark Gospel (VIII, 36): "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (translator's note: KJV). Wulfila translates world (cosmos, order, in the original) as beautiful house (t/n: fairhvu). Centuries later, Anglo-Saxons would translate world as woruld [wereald, age of Man], that sets human time against the infinite duration of divinity. The concepts of cosmos and world were quite abstract for the simple Germanic peoples."