“In the 1930’s a man named Benjamin Lee Whorf began to clarify an
insight he had had into the structure of the Hopi language. Hopi has only
limited tenses, noted Whorf, makes no reference to time as an entity as
distinct from space, and though relatively poor in nouns, is rich in verbs.
It is a language that projects a world of movement and changing
relationships, a continuous “fabric” of time and space. It is better suited
than the English language to describing quantum mechanics. English
divides time into linear segments by making use of many tenses. It is a
noun-rich, verb-poor tongue that contrasts fixed space with a flow of time.
It is a language of static space, more suited, say, to architectural
description. All else being equal, a Hopi child would have little difficulty
comprehending the theory of relativity in his own language, while an
American child could more easily master history. A Hopi would be
confounded by the idea that time flowed from the past to the present.
In 1936 Whorf wrote that many aboriginal languages “abound in finely
wrought, beautifully logical discriminations, about causation, action,
result, dynamic and energetic quality, direction of experience, etc…”
He made people see that there were no primitive languages; and that there
was no pool of thought from which all cultures drew their metaphysics.
“All observers,” he cautioned, “are not led by the same physical evidence
to the same picture of the universe.”
Excerpted from “Arctic Dreams”, author Barry Lopez.
Published by Charles Scribner’s Sons and published simultaneously
in Canada by Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc.
Although the Hopi are not of the Arctic, Lopez mentions them in relation
to his study of the Eskimo people.
I do believe that over time I will be quoting often from this profound,
absolutely encyclopedic study of the Arctic.
Islander.