The timeless claim
In the 1930s, a chemical engineer and amateur linguist named Benjamin Lee Whorf made a startling assertion. He claimed the Hopi language, spoken in northeastern Arizona, contained "no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call 'time'". Whorf argued that Hopi speakers do not conceive of time as a linear progression from past to present to future, a concept he called "Standard Average European". Instead of tenses, he proposed that Hopi verbs indicate the nature of an event's reality. He divided the world into the "manifested" domain—the observable physical universe of the present and recent past—and the "unmanifested," which includes the distant past, the future, and the field of desires and thoughts.
This idea became the primary example of his theory of linguistic relativity, popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The theory posits that a language's structure affects its speakers' worldview and cognition. Whorf suggested that the Hopi language, by its very structure, imposed a different model of reality upon its speakers, where time is not a flowing river but a cyclical and event-focused process. He noted that Hopi expressions for duration often relied on ordinal counting, like "until the eleventh day," rather than quantifying time into units like "ten days". His work, largely based on conversations with a single Hopi speaker in New York City, ignited a decades-long debate.