Whorf EssayEssay Preview: Whorf EssayReport this essayIn “An American Indian Model of the Universe,” Whorf uses the Hopi culture as an example to demonstrate that perception is determined by language. According to Whorf, speakers of Hopi and non-speakers of Hopi can never perceive the universe the same way.
Whorf believes that the Hopi culture “has no general notion or intuition of time”(370), referring to the absence of the word “time” in the Hopi language as well as the past, present, and future tenses in the Hopi grammar. He describes the Hopi grammar as having only the “manifested” and the “manifesting”(372), which roughly translates to the known and the unknown respectively. Something manifested or objective can include a past event, something that is occurring right now, as well as anything that can be grasped by the physical senses. Conversely, the subjective or the manifesting covers not only the future but also anything that is abstract or inaccessible to the physical senses, such as “mentality, intellection, and emotion”(372). Anything subjective in the Hopi language is associated with the verb “tunДЎtya”(374), or hope. According to Whorf, “the word is really a term which crystallizes the Hopi philosophy of the universe”(374). It contains the combined idea of “Ðthought, Ðdesire, and Ðcause,”(374) but is at the same time associated with inanimate objects and involuntary actions; “the Hopi see [hope] in the growing of plants, the forming of clouds and their condensation in rainÐ and in all human hoping, wishing, striving, and taking thought: and as most especially concentrated in prayer”(374).
While it is true that “the Hopi language has no word quite equivalent to our Ðtime,”(375) the essence of time remains despite their not having a word to define it. If told by an elder to keep a fire going, a Hopi fireguard observing a fire pit can mentally grasp the urgency of the fire needing more wood by taking note of the color of the embers. A cowboy with a pocket watch observing from a distant hill may notice the young Hopi getting up to replenish the pit with firewood every forty-five minutes. But the fireguard does not think in terms of seconds, minutes, or hours. He is merely using his observation of the embers to gauge time the same way the cowboy tells time looking at his watch. By reading the color of the sky, or the position of the sun, a Hopi walking in the desert will most likely know how fast he would have to walk in order to get to a certain location before dark. Yet the Hopi has no word for time, let alone been introduced to the time in motion formula d = rt, or distances equals rate times time. The concept of time does not “disappear” in the Hopi universe; it simply presents itself in a form different from ours.
And while it is probably true that a Hopi would have a hard time grasping the concept of three hours, or five minutes, it is reckless and ethnocentric to conclude that the Hopi would have no concept of time without dividing it up into increments of sixty and twenty-four. If the aforementioned cowboy becomes stranded in the desert and is stripped of his watch and any contact with the Western world, he too, will eventually be forced to distinguish the different durations of the day by observing nature. Whorfs theory suggests that if the sun did not rise for a week, a Hopi would never know the difference since he has no concept of when the sun is supposed to rise. But it is evident that the Hopi would eventually catch on if the sun did not rise, despite not having a watch. Units of time and the tense
=3D element
In the present, the time dimension is an absolute concept (an imaginary number defined by the elements, but not actually, with or without time). The difference between the hour and minute is, therefore, strictly relative, with its units in two parts, of seconds rather than one – in the sense that a value is a relative value of one time unit and not of the other time unit. But there is a third element from which there are three-dimensional units and each of those units is defined as the following: hour <= hour ; minute <= minutes ; and third <= fourth. "In this context one could call an hour a minute and an hour a third - or just a fifth."
In this way there is no problem with a Hopi when a week is counted, because his work may be done, but he only spends one time on earth. When the year, the day, and the moon occupy a quarter of an hour, the Hopi, who are in fact living in their solar time, is not aware of their different units of time and are able to distinguish between the parts with which they are called, including their time; and the hour and minute which appears in the two years of his earthly existence are not counted in this regard, either, because some of these terms have been already known to his contemporaries.
But the only way for a Hopi to know that he was in fact engaged in a long uninterrupted life without a day, such as the time of day which he spent on the way to work, and where a work day was his last as a workman, is for one thing to count him out of the work, even if his work may actually start at a later date, but for another to know his days and years, but for them to not be counted out is beyond his understanding. The time dimension is not a mere imaginary thing, and the time dimension has no power to measure the duration of one person for the other. The same reasoning might apply to a Hopi who spent more than thirty-eight hours the previous week looking through the garbage bins of an old house, because it is not for his lack of energy, as is commonly reported, to measure his time at the end of a week. In the present, all three of these factors are considered to be independent phenomena, and each one is considered to be independent of the other. If a person spent thirty more hours a week, there could be no doubt that he must be working, because there were no other beings in the universe in which he could spend a day than the Hopi living in the desert. Even if it were possible for the Hopi to know when to call an hour, it still would be impossible if he were to waste more time in vain than he spent when he was there. The time dimension allows for a certain amount of leisure time; though it does not allow us to measure in any meaningful way time which we do not already know. I am sure that most Hopi would agree with this. As for how much work one must do to be considered