https://d2ng68cf36kxsk.cloudfront.net/store/public/post/879/post_images/Slide286.JPG">

Though, it was not a professional linguist who first and most clearly articulated this idea, but a fire prevention inspector from the Hartford Fire Insurance Company.

Benjamin Lee Whorf had studied chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and for the rest of his life he had only one paying job, inspecting fire sprinkler systems at industrial buildings and chemical plants. The job gave him opportunities to travel, and a good deal of flexibility with his uncharacteristically not-quite-modern time.

Whorf developed an interest in language, including the language of the Hopi, a First People whose ancestral lands are in today’s Arizona. He visited there just once, in 1938, but from 1932 he began documenting the language of a Hopi speaker, Ernest Naquayouma, at the time living in New York City.¹⁵³

Whorf’s focus became the differences between Hopi and English languages, illustrated powerfully in the comparison of concepts of time. Hopi verbs have nine aspects, he concluded, all implicating time in delicately graduated ways not explicitly marked in English tenses: punctual, durative, segmentative, punctual-segmentative, inceptive, progressional, spatial (often a metaphor^§AS1.4.4a for time), projective, and continuative.¹⁵⁴ There are three tenses – factual or present-past, future, and generalized or usitative – and these do not align with the big three of English.¹⁵⁵

The Hopi present-past is that which is “accessible to the senses, the historical physical universe,” material traces that have a degree of objectivity. The Hopi future is that which is manifesting, processes of eventuation captured in anticipations that must in their nature be subjective, expectancies in the form of necessarily mental figments. At the edge of the present-past and the future, is the inceptive.¹⁵⁶

Not only do Hopi tenses frame time differently from English; time is commonly expressed as unfolding action, in verbs. In English, time is a sequence of repeating events, objectified as nouns homogenized by the property of number: repetitively as hours, days, and years. In this way, English and other languages that Whorf calls “standard average European” objectify time. By quantification of lengths of time, “artificially … expressed by a linear relation of past-present-future,” we “lose contact with the subjective experience of ‘becoming later’,” or what might be considered in Hopi to be “durating,” or “eventing – the ceaseless ‘latering’ of events.”¹⁵⁷

After Whorf’s death, an unpublished article was found among his papers in which he concludes that, in Hopi, there is “no general notation or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate … [T]he Hopi language is seen to contain no words, grammatical forms, constructions that refer directly to what we call time.”¹⁵⁸

Critics have seized upon this sentence. Of course, the Hopi language has notions of time, and linguist Ekkehart Malotki finds enough examples to fill 677 pages of his book with anti-Whorf invective.¹⁵⁹ But Whorf’s point was not that Hopi had no notions of time. Rather, they were different from “what we call time” in languages like English. Whorf is at meticulous pains to document those differences. Perhaps if he brought this article to publication he might have reworded these sentences in a more circumspect way, though in the larger context of his work, his meaning should have been obvious even to the most insistently unsympathetic reader.

Perhaps more remarkable than the details of his linguistics was that Whorf was prepared to countenance an until-then barely thinkable idea. This was that people who had hitherto been considered primitive not only thought in ways that were different from the inhabitants of the science-drenched West, but might think in ways that were in some respects more perspicacious.¹⁶⁰

The Hopi language, Whorf said, “is capable of accounting for and describing correctly … all observable phenomena in the universe.” This shows that “it is possible to have descriptions of the universe, all equally valid, that do not contain our familiar contrasts of time and space. The relativity viewpoint of modern physics is one such view, conceived in mathematical terms, and the Hopi Weltanschauung [worldview] is another quite different one.”

More than this, in contrast to understandings of homogenous time and space in Newtonian mechanics, Hopi contains “abstractions for which our language lacks adequate terms.”¹⁶¹ Hopi, says Whorf, also comes closer to Bergson’s notion of “duration”^§AS1.3.1a than the mathematical time of modern physics. So, “the linguistic relativity principle: … each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself a shaper of ideas.”¹⁶²“Language first of all is a classification and arrangement of the stream of sensory experience which results in a certain world-order.”¹⁶³ And some languages, in some respects, may do this better than others.

Whorf met academic linguist Edward Sapir at a conference in 1928, but did not form a close association with him until 1931 when Sapir took up a post as Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, not far from Whorf’s insurance company’s office in Hartford. He began attending Sapir’s classes, and this steered his linguistic interests in the direction of American languages.¹⁶⁴

This is how linguistic relativity has come to be called “the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.” Languages, said Sapir, are “arbitrary systems of symbolism,” each of which is “the outward facet of thought.” In this perspective, so-called “primitive languages have a formal richness, a latent luxuriance of expression, that eclipses anything known to the languages of modern civilization.”¹⁶⁵

Sapir’s was an outsider’s perspective. Never comfortable at Yale, he was one of only four Jews among 569 faculty. For this, he was denied membership of the Graduate Club, a crucial place for academic networking.¹⁶⁶

Not to favor “the parochial point of view of the favored parties” of history, Whorf suggests that, more than merely relative, the Hopi view might in some respects be closer to Einstein’s relativity than our conventional Newtonian understandings. “Certain ideas born of our own time-concept, such as that of absolute simultaneity, would … be devoid of meaning under the Hopi concept.”¹⁶⁷ Einstein would agree with the Hopi about this, although of course they reach their respective conclusions by different paths.

Albert Einstein had been a mediocre student. After he failed the entrance examination to the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, he attended instead the liberal cantonal school in Aarau, Switzerland. Here he was taught by linguist Jost Winteler. Einstein was taken in by him as a boarder, becoming an adopted family member. Winteler was a founder of the field of dialectology, where he developed and applied the notion of “configurational relativity” to speech. This was a lucky moment for Einstein, and his biographers agree, an academic turning point. Forty years later, Einstein would call his intellectual mentor his inspiration, “the clairvoyant Papa Winteler.”¹⁶⁸

---

¹⁵³ Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1956, Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 17.

¹⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 103.

¹⁵⁵ Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1936, “The Punctual and Segmentative Aspects of Verbs in Hopi,” Language 12(2):127–31, p. 127.

¹⁵⁶ Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1950, “An American Indian Model of the Universe,” International Journal of American Linguistics 16(2):67–72, pp. 68–69; Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1938, “Some Verbal Categories of Hopi,” Language 14(4):275–86.

¹⁵⁷ Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1956, Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 140, 144, 146, 151.

¹⁵⁸ Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1950, “An American Indian Model of the Universe,” International Journal of American Linguistics 16(2):67–72, p. 67.

¹⁵⁹ Ekkehart Malotki, 1983, Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Categories in the Hopi Language, Berlin: Mouton; David W. Dinwoodie, 2006, “Time and the Individual in Native North America,” pp. 327–48 in New Perspectives on Native North America, edited by S.A. Kan and P.T. Strong, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

¹⁶⁰ Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1956, Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 81.

¹⁶¹ Ibid., p. 58.

¹⁶² Ibid., pp. 216, 221, 212.

¹⁶³ Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1936, “The Punctual and Segmentative Aspects of Verbs in Hopi,” Language 12(2):127–31, p. 130.

¹⁶⁴ Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1956, Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 16.

¹⁶⁵ Edward Sapir, 1921, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech, New York: Harcourt Brace, pp. 11, 15, 22.

¹⁶⁶ Gelya Frank, 1997, “Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 99(4):731–45, p. 736.

¹⁶⁷ Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1956, Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 218, 153, 158.

¹⁶⁸ Frank Heynick, 1983, “From Einstein to Whorf: Space, Time, Matter, and Reference Frames in Physical and Linguistic Relativity,” Semiotica 45(1/2):35–64, pp. 53–54; Roman Jakobson, 1972, “Verbal Communication,” Scientific American 227(3):72–81, p. 75.

---

Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 74–77. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Hopi Time: Benjamin Lee Whorf’s “Linguistic Relativity” §AS1.3.1c