The question of whether languages shape the way we thinkgo back centuries; Charlemagne proclaimed that " to have a second 1language is to have a second soul". But the idea went out of favor to 2scientists when Noam Chomsky's theories of language gained popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. Dr. Chomsky proposed thatthere was a universal grammar for all human languages—essentially, 3that languages don't really differ from one another in significant ways. And because languages didn't differ from one another, thetheory went, it made none sense to ask whether linguistic differences 4led to differences in thinking. The search for the linguistic universals yielded interesting 5data on languages, and after decades of work, not a single 6proposing universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists 7probed deeper into the world's languages(7,000 or so, only afraction of them analyzed), innumerable predictable differences 8emerged. Of course, just because people talk differently doesn't necessarily mean they think differently. In the past decade, cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk,also how they think, asking whether our understanding of even such 9fundamental domains of experience that space, time and causality 10could be constructed by language.