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simplicio comments on Cultivating our own gardens - Less Wrong
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This is apocryphal, as can be seen on the Wikipedia page for Portuguese loanwords into Japanese.
I should add, though, that there are some surprising exceptions to universality out there, like the lack of certain (prima facie important) colour terms or numbers.
However, as someone who used to study languages passionately, I came to reject the stronger versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (language determines thought). One gradually comes to see that, though differences can be startling, the really odd omissions are often just got around by circumlocutions. For example, Russian lacks the highly specific past tenses English has (was, have been, had been, would have been, would be), but if there is any actual confusion, they just get around it with a few seconds explanation. Or in the Japanese example, even supposing it were true, I would expect some other formalized way of showing gratitude; hence "thanks" the concept would live on even if there was no word used in similar contexts to English "thanks."
Indeed; for another example, classical Latin did not use words for "yes" and "no". A question such as "Do you see it?" would have been answered with "I see it"/"I don't see it".
Alicorn's note about Chinese probably explains the basis for the eventual "Do not want!" meme, which came from a reverse translation of a crude Chinese translation of Darth Vader saying "Noooooooooooooo!" Link
The Chinese translator probably looked up what "No" means. Translation dictionaries, in turn, recognize that "No" doesn't have a direct translation, so they list several options, given the context. In the case that "no" is a refusal of something, the translation in Chinese should take the form "[I] do not want [that]". (If they have to list only one option, they pick the most likely meaning, and that may have been it.)
Then, clumsily using this option, the Chinese translator picked something that translates back as "do not want".
Chinese does something similar. "Do you see that?" would be answered affirmatively by saying the word for "See", or negatively by saying "Don't see". In some contexts, the words for "correct" and "incorrect" can be used a bit like "yes" and "no".
Very true. "Thank you" doesn't really have a meaning the same way other words do, since it's more of an interjection. When finding the translation for "thank you" in other languages, you just look at what the recipient of a favor says to express appreciation in that language, and call that their "thank you".
Otherwise, you could argue that "Spanish doesn't have a word for thank you -- but hey, on an unrelated note, native Spanish speakers have this odd custom of saying "gratitude" (gracias) whenever they want to thank someone..."