An Israeli friend told me recently that her English husband once asked her how to say 'dither' in Hebrew. She didn't know, so asked around in Tel Aviv, but her friends couldn't think of anything either and everyone agreed in the end that - Israelis just don't do dithering.

The English, by contrast, are world-class ditherers. The constitutional arrangement, for example - there's no written Constitution (far too decisive) and the Crown has theoretical power over everything and actual power over nothing. Or the legal system, which revolves around precedent and is not based on a formal, coherent legal code but rather on sustained judicial dithering over centuries. In international relations, English diplomats famously have always tended to say one thing to one country and something completely different to the others - not so much 'perfidious Albion' as 'dithering Albion', perhaps ? And just in everyday conversation you hear "Well, you could say ... on the other hand ... depends how you look at it ... oh, I don't know ..."

So perhaps that discredited Sapir Whorf idea (remember, the thing about Eskimos having lots of words for snow) might have some sense after all. Perhaps cultures get the language that they need to express what they really do. This is not so much about nouns describing simple facts about the world, but rather about phrases or even complex exchanges (such as in the language of politeness). A simplistic aspect of the Sapir-Whorf concept (it was actually Whorf who started the eskimo myth through a casual mention in an article) was that it rested on a very simple word-count - looking up words in a translating dictionary doesn't mean that you actually understand anything much about a language. The expressive power of a language is much more than the basic labels represented by individual words - it's how the labels are combined that is important.