The Hopi time controversy is the academic debate about how the Hopi language grammaticizes the concept of time, and about whether the differences between the ways the English and Hopi languages describe time are an example of linguistic relativity or not. In popular discourse, the debate is often framed as a question about whether the Hopi have a concept of time.
The debate originated in the 1940s when American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf argued that the Hopi conceptualized time differently from the Standard Average European speaker, and that this difference correlated with grammatical differences between the languages. Whorf argued that Hopi has "no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call 'time'" and concluded that the Hopi had "no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equal rate, out of a future, through the present, into a past." Whorf used the Hopi concept of time as a primary example of his concept of linguistic relativity, which posits that the way in which individual languages encode information about the world influences and correlates with the cultural world view of the speakers. Whorf's relativist views fell out of favor in linguistics and anthropology in the 1960s, but Whorf's statement lived on in the popular literature often in the form of an urban myth that "the Hopi have no concept of time."
In 1983, linguist Ekkehart Malotki published a 600-page study of the grammar of time in the Hopi language, concluding that he had finally refuted Whorf's claims about the language. Malotki's treatise gave hundreds of examples of Hopi words and grammatical forms referring to temporal relations. Malotki's central claim was that the Hopi do indeed conceptualize time as structured in terms of a self-centered spatial progression from past, through present into the future. He also demonstrated that the Hopi language grammaticalizes tense using a distinction between future and non-future tenses, as opposed to the English tense system, which is usually analyzed as being based on a past/non-past distinction. Many took Malotki's work as a definitive refutation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Bernard Comrie, a linguist and specialist in the linguistic typology of tense, concluded that "Malotki's presentation and argumentation are devastating." Psychologist Steven Pinker, a well-known critic of Whorf and the concept of linguistic relativity, accepted Malotki's claims as having demonstrated Whorf's complete ineptitude as a linguist.
Subsequently, the study of linguistic relativity was revived using new approaches in the 1990s, and Malotki's study came under criticism from relativist linguists and anthropologists, who did not consider the study to invalidate Whorf's claims. The main issue of contention is the interpretation of Whorf's original claims about Hopi, and what exactly it was that he was claiming made Hopi different from what Whorf called "Standard Average European" languages. Some consider that the Hopi language may be best described as a tenseless language, and that the distinction between non-future and future posited by Malotki may be better understood as a distinction between realis and irrealis moods. Regardless of exactly how the Hopi concept of time is best analyzed, most specialists agree with Malotki that all humans conceptualize time by an analogy with space, although some recent studies have also questioned this.
The Hopi language The Hopi language, spoken by some 5,000 Hopi people in the Hopi Reservation in Northeastern Arizona, is a Native American language of the Uto-Aztecan language family.
In the large Hopi dictionary, there is no word exactly corresponding to the English noun "time." Hopi employs different words to refer to "a duration of time" (pàasa''' "for that long"), to a point in time (pàasat "at that time"), and time as measured by a clock (pahàntawa), as an occasion to do something (hisat or qeni), a turn or the appropriate time for doing something (qeniptsi (noun)), and to have time for something (aw nánaptsiwta (verb)).
Time reference can be marked on verbs using the suffix -niMomoyam piktota, "The women are/were making piki," Women piki-makeMomoyam piktota-ni, "The women will be making piki," Women piki-make-NI
The -ni suffix is also used in the word naatoniqa, which means "that which will happen yet" in reference to the future. This word is formed from the adverb naato "yet"; the -ni suffix and the clitic -qa that forms a relative clause with the meaning "that which..."
The -ni suffix is also obligatory on the main verb in conditional clauses:Kur nu' pam tuwa nu' wuuvata-ni, "if I see him I'll run away," If I him see I run-NI
The suffix is also used in conditional clauses referring to a past context then often combined with the particle as that carries past tense or counterfactual meaning, or describes unachieved intent:Pam nuy tuwáq nu' so'on as wayaani, "If he had seen me I wouldn't have run," he me see I Neg Past/Counterfact. run-NINu' saytini, "I will smile," I smile-NINu' as saytini, "I tried to smile/I should smile/I wanted to smile/I was going to smile," I Past/Counterfact. smile-NI
The suffix -ngwu describes actions taking place habitually or as a general rule.Tömö' taawa tatkyaqw yámangwu, "In the winter the sun rises in the southeast"
Benjamin Lee Whorf Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), a fire prevention engineer by profession, studied Native American linguistics from an early age. He corresponded with many of the greatest scholars of his time, such as Alfred Tozzer at Harvard and Herbert Spinden of the American Museum of Natural History. They were impressed with his work on the linguistics of the Nahuatl language and encouraged him to participate professionally and to undertake field research in Mexico. In 1931 Edward Sapir, the foremost expert on Native American languages, started teaching at Yale, close to where Whorf lived, and Whorf signed up for graduate-level classes with Sapir, becoming one of his most respected students. Whorf took a special interest in the Hopi language and started working with Ernest Naquayouma, a speaker of Hopi from Toreva village on the Second Mesa of the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, who was living in the Manhattan borough of New York City. At this time, it was common for linguists to base their descriptions of a language on data from a single speaker. Whorf credited Naquayouma as the source of most of his information on the Hopi language, although in 1938 he took a short field trip to the village of Mishongnovi on the Second Mesa, collecting some additional data.
Whorf published several articles on Hopi grammar, focusing particularly on the ways in which the grammatical categories of Hopi encoded information about events and processes, and how this correlated with aspects of Hopi culture and behavior. After his death, his full sketch of Hopi grammar was published by his friend the linguist Harry Hoijer. Some of Whorf's essays on Native American linguistics, many of which had been previously published in academic journals, were collected in the 1956 anthology Language, Thought, and Reality by his friend psychologist John Bissell Carroll.
Whorf on Hopi time Whorf's most frequently cited statement regarding Hopi time is the strongly worded introduction of his 1936 paper "An American Indian model of the Universe," which was first published posthumously in Carroll's edited volume. Here he writes that:
Whorf argues that in Hopi units of time are not represented by nouns, but by adverbs or verbs. Whorf argues that all Hopi nouns include the notion of a boundary or outline, and that consequently the Hopi language does not refer to abstract concepts with nouns. This, Whorf argues, is encoded in Hopi grammar, which does not allow durations of time to be counted in the same way objects are. So instead of saying, for example, "three days," Hopi would say the equivalent of "on the third day," using ordinal numbers. Whorf argues that the Hopi do not consider the process of time passing to produce another new day, but merely as bringing back the daylight aspect of the world.
Hopi as a tenseless language Whorf gives slightly different analyses of the grammatical encoding of time in Hopi in his different writings. His first published writing on Hopi grammar was the paper "The punctual and segmentative aspects of verbs in Hopi," published in 1936 in Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America. Here Whorf analyzed Hopi as having a tense system with a distinction between three tenses: one used for past or present events (which Whorf calls the Factual tense or present-past); one for future events; and one for events that are generally or universally true (here called usitative). This analysis was repeated in a 1937 letter to J. B. Carroll, who later published it as part of his selected writings under the title "Discussion of Hopi Linguistics."
In the 1938 paper "Some verbal categories of Hopi," also published in Language, Whorf abandoned the word "tense" in the description of Hopi and described the distinction previously called "tense" with the label "assertions." Whorf described assertions as a system of categories that describe the speaker's claim of epistemic validity of his own statement. The three "assertions" of Hopi described by Whorf are the Reportive, Expective and Nomic forms of the Hopi verb. Whorf acknowledges that these "translate more or less [as] the English tenses," but maintains that these forms do not refer to time or duration, but rather to the speaker's claim of the validity of the statement. The reportive form is unmarked, whereas the expective form is marked with the verbal suffix -ni, and the nomic form with the suffix -ŋʷi. In Whorf's analysis, by using the reportive form the speaker claims that the event has in fact occurred or is still occurring, whereas by using the expective form the speaker describes an expectation of a future event. Whorf says that the expective can be used to describe events in the past, giving the meaning of "was going to" or "would."
In the 1940 article "Science and Linguistics," Whorf gave the same three-way classification based on the speaker's assertion of the validity of his statement: "The timeless Hopi verb does not distinguish between the present, past and future of the event itself but must always indicate what type of validity the intends the statement to have: a. report of an event .. b. expectation of an event ..; c. generalization or law about events."
In his full sketch of Hopi grammar published posthumously in 1946, Whorf also described how adverbial particles contributed to the linguistic description of time in Hopi. He posited two subclasses of adverbs called temporals and tensors, which were used in sentences to locate events in time. A central claim in Whorf's work on linguistic relativity was that for the Hopi units of time were not considered objects that can be counted like most of the comparable English words that are described by nouns (a day, an hour etc.). He argued that only the Hopi word for "year" was a noun, the words for days and nights were ambivalent between noun and verbs, but that all other cyclic events and periods were described by adverbial particles used as modifiers for the sentence.
The myth of the timeless Hopi