Pinker on the misunderstanding of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:

In interviews on language I have been asked, Who but the Jews would have a word, naches, for luminous pride in a child’s accomplishments? And does it not say something profound about the Teutonic psyche that the German lnaguage has the word Schadenfreude, pleasure in another’s misfortunes?

[…] Whether a language appears to have a word for an emotion depends on the skill of the translator and on quirks of the language’s grammar and history. A language accumulates a large vocabulary, including words for emotions, when it has had influential wordsmiths, contact with other languages, rules for forming new words out of old ones, and widespread literacy, which allows new coinages to become epidemic. When a language has not had these stimulants, people describe how they feel with circumlocutions, metaphors, metonyms, and synecdoches. […]

When English-speakers hear the word Schadenfreude for the first time, their reaction is not, “Let me see… Pleasure in another’s misfortunes… What could that possibly be? I cannot grasp the concept; my language and culture have not provided me with such a category.” Their reaction is, “You mean there’s a word for it? Cool!”