NewScientist (28 January 2017, paywall) has an interview with hyperpolyglot Alexander Arguelles, who estimates his fluency at 50 languages. I found this exchange fascinating:
But do thought patterns change with language?
While I don’t agree that you have a different personality when using different languages, it’s true that the structure of your thought sometimes has to be different. Because in Korean, for example, you don’t conjugate verbs according to person at all, but rather according to a wide variety of different “respect” levels that have to do with age, the nature of your relationship to the person you’re speaking with, and so on. Behind it all is a Confucian concept that if someone is six months older or younger than you, they have to be addressed differently than if they are the same age as you.
A glimpse into another world for me. They don’t ask the related question, of course, and Arguelles probably could not answer it anyways – that being, do the thought patterns of a native speaker of Korean fundamentally differ from the thought patterns of a native speaker of English. A related question would be whether he automatically changes the conjugation, or if he must think about it while he speaks.
I should probably try to learn a second language.
