Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds through our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it. So if, from perhaps some unhealthy desire for sympathetic support, you describe your life in negative terms you will find that this will reinforce your mind's negative emotions and make you unhappy and even more susceptible to feeling unhappy in the future. By simply doing the reverse and focusing on why you are lucky and grateful things are not worse, you will strengthen and increase your mind's positive emotions and make yourself happy and even more likely to feel happy in the future.

But in due course it became evident that not only a physical situation qua physics, but the meaning of that situation to people, was sometimes a factor, through the behavior of people, in the start of a fire.

The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.