Found passages

So, I've been reading Marcus du Sautoy's book on Symmetry and I was some what weirded out by this passage:

Some French mathematicians believe that the quality of their mathematics is a product of the French language in which it was written. [...] Bruno Poizat is particularly proud of the French language and never bows to pressures from journals to write in in English, the universally accepted language of science. One of his most important contributions is a seminal book on mathematical logic and its interactions with the theory of groups. His insistence on publishing in French meant that no publisher would touch it. SO he went ahead and financed the publication of the book himself under his own publishing name: Nur al-Mantiq wal Ma'rifah, Aribic for 'Light and Logic of Knowledge', Because he had complete editorial control the book is rather idiosyncratic. Every chapter starts with a pornographic picture. Poizat explains in the introduction that these pictures are there to soothe the brain before the difficult mathematics that follows.

[...] the last chapter has a picture of the author in a dressing gown, leering out of an armchair at the reader. but the mathematics is so good the book could not be ignored. In Poizat's view, the material is particularly suited to the language in which it is written:

Scientific French, what a beautiful language!...I have no French nationalist feelings, nor a nostalgia for the time when French had a more dominant position...I believe the plurality of languages is use for communication of science has a value per se.

 At a conference I attended in Russia, Poizat insisted on speaking in French with simultaneous translation into Russian, and was obviously delighted to leave the English-only members of the audience in the dark:

Well intentioned people have told me that it is quite rude to address a person he or she cannot understand. If this were true, the community of mathematicians would rate highly in the scale of rudeness considering the number of times its members have spoken to me in English. (174-175)

Is this strange? Or is it not so unusual that people might think that English is re-wiring their brains?
As I was reading du Sautoy, Jun 'ichiro Tanizaki was playing in my mind...

To take a trivial example near at hand: I write a magazine article recently comparing the writing brush with the fountain pen, and in the course of it I remarked that if the device had been invented by the ancient Chinese or Japanese it would surely have had a tufted end like out writing brush. The ink would not have been this bluish color but rather black, something like India ink, and it would have been made to seep down the handle into the brush. And since we would have found it inconvenient to write on Western paper, something near Japanese paper - even under mass production, if you will - would have been much in demand [...] But more than that: our thought and our literature might not be imitating the West as they are, but might have pushed forward into new regions quite on their own. An insignificant little piece of writing equipment {...} has a vast, has a vast, almost boundless influence on our culture.

Tanizaki goes on to wonder how math and science would be different if they were unshackled from English and rendered in Japanese.

Is language really that important to you, dear reader? Or is there some meaning at the core all this that somehow transcends mere words? I would love to hear from you...