Response: Language Barriers

In response to Brian's post "Frey Oddly Stipulative" (February 11, 2012):
I very much like the last point in this post, about Frey's opinion that the structure of language is more important than the thought behind the language.  If this is really the case, then different groups of humans think in radically different ways from one another.  This is so because many different (human) languages are arranged along extremely variable lines.  For someone who is only familiar with English and perhaps a bit of Spanish or French, this may not stand out as much; those three languages, while different in structure, are similar enough that if one were to replace words in Spanish or French with their English equivalents without altering the grammar, the result would sound merely like a heavy accent, but would still be understandable.  However, languages from other areas are much, much less similar to the Western languages that most of the readers of this blog are likely to be familiar with.  Eastern, African, and Native American languages are typically so different from English that if one were to replace their words with English equivalents the result would be virtually indecipherable.  How can we say with certainty that non-human methods of communication are anything more than languages which have even less in common with human languages than human languages do with one another?