In recent years, during my prolonged summer stays at Grabov Rat, Croatian/English language uncertainness (that’s a soft term for ignorance) gets more pronounced. I’ve never mastered the English satisfactorily (meaning comparable to Croatian) and my Croatian has weakened (meaning that year by year I mix more English terms in my spoken Croatian).

Now, wait a minute, do I mix English terms because I don’t remember Croatian? Is there a deeper reason for that? Not necessarily a genetic one - what is so popular nowadays.

I don’t believe that thinking process goes in any particular language. I believe that "wiring" in our brain is not different from my dog’s brain, that on many subjects our thinking is very likely identical. It is only in communication within the same species, occasionally other species too, that a language takes place. Obviously, wiring in the brain includes capability for a language, dog’s and mine, something like "blue print", but many variations are possible depending on communication requirements. So, if in an English speaking environment, I’ve associated certain thinking with a particular language term, there is no guaranty for a Croatian equivalent. And here I don’t mean literal translation, if there is one, but meaning depth and broadness of the term.

Take, for instance, ‘hardware’ and ‘software. To start with, there is no Croatian term of so broad meaning as ‘hardware’, covering all tools and devices in a way that computers could be included. The discrepancy is even heavier with ‘software’, the term coined in English for the tools in non-physical world, coined in so nice and meaningful parallel with ‘hardware’.

While browsing for some education on the subject, here is what Wikipedia gives under Linguistic relativity:

The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its respective speakers conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view, or otherwise influences their cognitive processes. Popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, the principle is often defined as having two versions: (i) the strong version that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories and (ii) the weak version that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behaviour.