My fault for not confirming the veracity of that story in particular, but I was using it as an illustration of accessibility to concepts in different language, independent of its truth. I just supposed that this story is widely known, but I could have (perhaps should have) easily used another example. There are several words in Chinese that describe taste without direct English translations that I know of (it is harder to sustain these ideas nowadays, given the quickness of word-borrowing like "umami"). One of them is "fish stink," which really isn't fish stink. A strong S-W will say the concept is inaccessible to the non-Chinese speaker, and, of course, that isn't true.
In fact you don't even need to cross language boundaries to see the same effect: layman versus technical terminology reveals analogous differences in "perception." Me not knowing the name of industry colors does not mean I cannot perceive these colors (let's assume a single-sex population), but I will gladly group together large groups of colors into single words.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow