I love it when fiction merges with non-fiction, and a book that was recently passed on to me by a friend in Beijing is a prime example of this. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is a hyperlinked mesh of references to science, mythology and linguistics.
There are two schools: relativists and universalists. As George Steiner summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language is not the vehicle of thought but its determining medium. It is the framework of cognition. Our perceptions of everything are organized by the flux of sensations passing over that framework. Hence, the study of the evolution of the language is the study of the evolution of the human mind itself.
Stephenson, Neal. (1992) Snow Crash. Bantam Dell: New York. p.275
