Hopi time controversy
[3] 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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] 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.
In particular he has no notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future into a present and into a past .... After a long and careful analysis the Hopi language is seen to contain no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call 'time', or to past, present or future ...[2]Whorf argues that in Hopi units of time are not represented by nouns, but by adverbs or verbs.
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.
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.[27]: p.
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.).
[32] Similarly, even scientists were intrigued by the thought that the idea of spatio-temporal unity that had taken Albert Einstein seven years to ponder, was readily available to the Hopi, simply because of the grammar of their language.
[38] Whorf's argument that the Hopi do not conceive of time and space as speakers of Indo-European languages do clashed with this basic understanding of cognition.
"[39] Ekkehart Malotki studied with Gipper at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität at Münster and his work was a continuation of his mentor's, spurred on by the frequent claims in the popular literature that "the Hopi have no concept of time."
[3] For Malotki it was imperative to demonstrate two facts in contradiction of Whorf's claims: 1. that the Hopi language has an abundance of terms, words and constructions that refer to time.
[41] Hopi Time opens with a quotation drawn from his extensive field work, which directly challenges Whorf's claim of a lack of temporal terms in the Hopi language: "Then [pu’] indeed, the following day, quite early in the morning at the hour when people pray to the sun, around that time then [pu’] he woke up the girl again.
The first part of the book describes "spatio-temporal metaphors;" in it he shows several deictic adverbs that are used both to reference distance in space and in time, such as the word ep that means both "there" and "then."
"[43] He also shows that the Hopi reckon time through the movement of the sun, having distinct words for the different degrees of light during the dawn and dusk periods.
As it turns out from among the numerous suffixes that the Hopi verb can select to mark the grammatical categories of aspect, mode and tense, one is specifically reserved to refer to time, or rather the sequential ordering of events or states.
Since no markers exist to point out present or past time, Hopi, like many other languages, can be said to be endowed with a future-nonfuture tense system.
[17] The review by Bernard Comrie, a well-known authority on the linguistic typology of tense and aspect, accepts that Malotki's work demonstrates that the Hopi do have a concept of time and that it is devastating for Whorf's strong claims.
"[51] And the myth continues to be an integral part of New Age thinking that draws on stereotypical depictions of "timeless Hopi culture.
[53] Historian of science G E R Lloyd held that Malotki's investigation "made it abundantly clear that the Hopi had, and have, no difficulty whatsoever in drawing distinctions between past, present, and future.
"[54] Some investigators of Puebloan astronomical knowledge have taken a compromise position, noting that while Malotki's study of Hopi temporal concepts and timekeeping practices "has clearly refuted Whorf's assertion that Hopi is a 'timeless' language, and in doing so has destroyed Whorf's strongest example for linguistic relativity, he presents no naively positivist assertion of the total independence of language and thought.
[56] Lucy notes that when Whorf makes his strong claim about what it is that Hopi lacks, he consistently puts the word "time" in scare quotes, and uses the qualifier "what we call.
[10] In 2006, anthropologist David Dinwoodie published a severe critique of Malotki's work, questioning his methods and his presentation of data as well as his analysis.
Dinwoodie argues that Malotki fails to adequately support his claim of having demonstrated that the Hopi have a concept of time "as we know it.
