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.
A clock strikes back
For years, Whorf's description of a "timeless" language was widely circulated. The debate shifted dramatically in 1983 with the publication of "Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language." In this 600-page book, linguist Ekkehart Malotki presented hundreds of examples from Hopi speakers that directly contradicted Whorf's claims. Malotki had conducted years of fieldwork on the Hopi Reservation and documented an extensive system for discussing time.
Malotki demonstrated that the Hopi language has an extensive vocabulary for temporal concepts and a grammatical system to handle them. He identified a future/non-future tense system, marked by the suffix "-ni" which indicates futurity. While different from the past/non-past system of English, it clearly allows speakers to place events in the future. Malotki argued that Hopi speakers do conceptualize time as a progression from past to present to future, using spatial metaphors and a sophisticated system of aspects and modals to place events in sequence. Today, most linguists agree that Whorf's original claims were a significant oversimplification. The Hopi can and do speak about the past, present, and future. The controversy, however, moved the study of linguistic relativity forward, refining the question from whether language determines thought to how it influences it.