the correlation between language, thoughts and intelligence

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Does having words for things determine if you can think about them?

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there's this very interesting study by a couple cognitive psychologists that i recently read. apparently, the russian language has different words for light blue and dark blue, whereas english obviously requires you to use an adjective when discriminating between the two. in the study, the authors had native russian speakers and native english speakers discriminate between different shades of different colors, and whereas the native english speakers were unable to differentiate between different shades of blue (the differences were quite subtle), the native russian speakers did it with relative ease. pretty interesting results as they suggest that language influences your perception of the world and by extension your thoughts about the world. obviously, i'm making a big jump comparing the ability to see different colors to how we think about the world, but it is pretty interesting that there is empirical validation for this.

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I think this is true. It can be very hard to nail down a coalescing thought until you find a word for it. Then suddenly it falls into shape and perspective, not just because you couldn't recall a word to characterize and describe your thought until just then, but because you couldn't properly form the thought itself without using the thought-concepts of words to trace it out. The word helps shape the thought, and bring it to the workbench of consciousness long enough for any necessary further work.