Languages and analogies

Hofstadter talks about making analogies in preface 5. Within the preface, at some point, Hofstadter talks about the different meanings associated with words and how it impacts analogies. Theres also a mention of how the distribution or structure of meaning on any given concept in foreign languages is vastly different from English in some cases. I always like to stop and consider the differences between languages and meaning because I'm bilingual. I've studied other languages on the side... Latin, Spanish, Japanese. I don't speak all of them, but I've had some instruction in them.

Its always interesting to hear about the cultural information, particularly some of the expressions present and examine how different they are from your primary language. Recently this topic came up elsewhere and I remembered an example that I noticed years ago. Consider music in which there is singing. The rhythm of words fit nicely with the song and contribute to the overall sound of it. Since words may sound radically different between languages, there might be places where a word simply wouldn't fit in English, because of length for example. Even this aside, the complete meaning of words is also usually very different. Translation from one language to another requires some parsing of meaning, then reconstruction in the target language. Literal translation almost never works. (Though it makes for some pretty funny constructions usually. ;)

Naturally, meaning is required for the expression of analogies, and so this operates on a higher level than single words. Analogies are about the link between concepts, not necessarily the concepts themselves. I wonder if, since the meanings of words are different, their structure and distribution and everything, that analogies suffer from the same sort of problems as words in literal translations? (I never stop blabbering about how stuff like this would be cool to see expressed in other languages, and examine the mappings and such, but honestly, its really cool, I think.)

Beyond the structure of the language, how does it influence the way people think? Does that cause them to inherently make different sorts of analogies? I'd assume so. Where does this put bilingual people though? Do they think differently than people who only speak one of their two languages? Do the languages mesh well, in terms of analogies, for the individual?

Is there even a way of measuring something like this yet?