I have studied some ancient Greek, Latin, German and Japanese. Japanese has loan words for European language, which are obvious, because they're in a different "alphabet" then the other words (katakana or grass-writing), other than that Japanese is very different than Indo-European. But, I agree the comparison with something totally different is quite illuminating.
My own background is a lot of the ancient Greek tradition, particularly philosophy, but I haven't neglected looking at non-philosophical stuff, although poetry is hard because my Greek is not very good.
I wonder how philosophy translates from Greek into Arabic. I got a sense that Indo-European languages talk about "Being" as a thing, whereas non-indo-European languages don't. Talking about "Being" as a thing lends itself to metaphysics. Or at least that is some idea I picked up somewhere. Of course, medieval Islamic philosophy was something that flourished for a certain period, and I know that the Arabic tradition is a lot richer than just that, but I sometimes wonder if Islamic philosophy rose again, would it help with some of the tensions between the West and the East? What do you think?