All from Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (New York: Henry Holt 2010).....
Charles V preferred to speak "Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse."
If he wanted to talk about what we think of as the mind, though, he would be in a bit of a pickle. Neither the French nor the German language has a word that represents what we English speakers think of as the 'mind.' And, English has no single word that conveys what the French mean when they refer to 'esprit.'
