The Whorf Hypothesis is a linguistic theory, particularly popular in America, claiming that the language you speak has a strong influence in the way you think.
I personally think that the theory is mostly bunk. On the other hand, I believe that being exposed early in life to _multiple_ languages _does_ affect the way you think. Namely, even your verbal knowledge and skills somehow become fairly language-independent.
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I like to tell two personal anecdotes as evidence for this belief.
One: I once read a great small book by Italo Calvino, _Cosmicomics_, a collection of short surreal Scifi stories. I lost the book somewhere, but I still remember most of the stories, even some cute sentences and expressions. In fact, I also remember the book's size and cover, the page layout, the fonts...
...the only thing I can't remember, no matter how hard I try, is whether the book was in Italian or English. 🧵>
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I do remember where I bought the book; but it was at the University's bookstore, which carried books in foreign languages as well as English translations. So that does not help...
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Two: IN 1979, when I was in the first year of my PhD, an office-mate called Arthur Keller wrote a set of lecture notes for the Pascal course that he was TAing. (Just for fun, I drew a cartoon for his cover, with Blaise sitting at a terminal.)
Since his notes got some praise, he decided to publish them as a book. (It was one of the first books typeset in TeX, after Knuth's of course.) The book was fairly successful and even translated into other languages.
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He knew that I spoke Italian, so, when he got an Italian edition of the book, he asked me to translate the book's preface.
Halfway through it I noticed that he had a very amused look, barely holding laughter. It took me a little longer to realize that at some point I had switched from translating into English to translating into Portuguese...
Jorge Stolfi