Time ticks forward in English, but did you know in Mandarin earlier is up
and later is down?
Or that the Yucatec Maya have no word for before or after?
These sound like the kind of fun facts you share with a friend and move on.
But for linguists, time is at the center of a major debate: are there languages where
time just doesn't work like we think it does?
There's a linguist who's spent his entire career documenting and trying to understand
one language: Hopi.
After four years of fieldwork in Arizona, on the Third Mesa, surely he has real insights
to share about every aspect of the language.
And yet in this long book he focuses on just one: Hopi Time.
Over 600 pages of Hopi Time, with example after example of how, just like English, Hopi
has words for time, like "later" or "temporarily".
The Hopi count days.
They use terms like "over there" as spatial metaphors for time.
And their verbs have tenses: they can mark the future with -ni.
Time, time, everywhere time!
Ok, so the Hopi can tell time.
What's the big deal?
Well, it must've mattered to someone, because linguists and psychologists and people who'd
never heard a word of Hopi in their lives grabbed the book and held it high as proof
that time was universal for humans.
And then they cursed the name of Whorf.
Whorf was wrong!
Whorf was a charlatan!
Whorf was a con man!
Hold on, what's the fuss?
Who ever said that Hopi doesn't think about the past, present and future?
Plus who's this Whorf and why is he getting picked on so much?
Whorf was a fire inspector.
But one with a unique hobby: Uto-Aztecan languages.
This curiosity led him Sapir, who took Whorf under his wing.
Psst, hey, I've got some literature that'll blow your mind.
See, Humboldt and Boas taught us how different cultures subconsciously categorize the world
based on language.
But I think there's more.
I think people are at the mercy of language.
We're not living in the objective world, man, we're living through our language.
Hah, what an odd idea.
But as Whorf turned to another Uto-Aztecan language, he started to see it.
Hopi seemed so un-European to him in the way it handled time.
There was no substance called "time".
No timeline that could be cut and counted.
No space as a metaphor for time, as if you could move through time.
Not even a past, a present or a future tense.
The more Whorf studied Hopi, the more he concluded that the arrow of time isn't something that
exists in our objective world.
Instead, we think about time this way because we speak Standard Average European.
The Hopi don't share our concept of time because they speak Hopi.
How do the Hopi live without tense?
Well, for Whorf, Hopi time is about cycles, rituals, mental preparation for key events.
Above all, they have no objective time.
Sapir died at age 55 and Whorf joined him a couple years later, aged 44.
But his ideas were captivating: do people think about time
differently in different languages?
Does your language shape your concept of time?
Does the language you speak determine whether or not time even exists for you?
These claims, from weak to strong, got the nickname "Sapir-Whorf", which I often hear
pronounced "SA-pir Whorf".
Hopi Time became its poster child.
And an ever-growing big fish tale.
Hopi is innocent of a category for time.
No, worse, our concept of time would be incomprehensible to them.
Better yet, the reason you have clocks and watches is because you aren't Hopi.
Hah, and my favorite, Hopi time makes for better family therapy than the Aristotelian
reality Western parents are stuck in.
So now do you see the power of these 600 pages spent vanquishing Whorf
and mainstreaming Hopi?
Linguists had had enough.
Many of them wanted to focus on what made language universal and innate to all of us.
Stop parading Hopi around as an exotic oddity.
We all think the same way, we just express ourselves with a little linguistic flair.
So then, time is time is time.
It's settled.
Not quite.
Dot-dot-dot.
Years after Hopi Time, researchers claimed they'd found new evidence showing Whorf was
right about time all along.
Like this set of experiments playing on the difference between how English and Mandarin
speakers use space to talk about time.
"Earlier" is to your left and "later" to your right in English, but in Mandarin things get
vertical: "earlier" is up and "later" down.
Even though these experiments were conducted entirely in English, native Mandarin speakers
were quicker to answer simple questions about earlier or later after being primed with vertical
cues, while native English speakers were faster after horizontal cues.
Thinking about time, it seemed, was shaped by language.
The masses were intrigued, myself included.
Someone passed me a link to it in my work inbox years ago,
and I wasn't even with linguists.
But in the comments of my old video about Whorf, a researcher did mention having trouble
replicating these results.
From what I've read since then, that commenter isn't alone.
Still, it was just one of the many Whorf-like effects that kept making the news, some from
scientific tests in the lab, others from fieldwork on the ground.
So in the Central Andes, there's a language spoken by millions called Aymara.
In Aymara, your nayra, your "eye" is in front of you, and your qhipa, your "back"
is behind you.
That's normal, but this isn't.
When talking about time, the Aymara speak as if they face the past, but they have their
backs to the future.
They even point behind their backs to gesture into the future.
So their eyes are exactly where your eyes are,
but their past is not where your past is.
Rare.
Unique.
But there's something else about Aymara... and Hopi.
At second glance, some linguists tell us both of them are best viewed as tenseless.
Wait, there are timeless languages out there?
Well, kind of.
Tenseless.
It's not as odd as it first sounds.
We already know of languages that are uncontroversially tenseless.
Take Yucatec Maya.
Not only are they missing a past, present and future tense, they even lack words like
"before", "until" and "after".
How in the world do they talk about time?
Well, strategies.
Complex strategies like context and aspect.
It could make a fun followup to dig into the mechanics of
how tenseless languages talk about time.
But good luck proving any of this makes them experience time
in a fundamentally different way.
Yucatec speakers do fine in experiments about linear time, and any effects are subtle.
See, if you read the research and not the breaking headlines, "strong" ideas of language
determining time, those are out.
Any ongoing debates are about subtler influences.
In the end, languages do talk about time differently, but it's harder to get speakers to behave
differently based on their language.
But I'll level with you.
I get the sense that trivia about time and tenses was never the point.
Hopi time became a mascot for a grander idea: linguistic relativity.
Or as Sapir put it, different societies live in distinct worlds, not merely the same world
with different labels attached.
That's an idea I suspect we'll run into again in the future.
Until then, stick around and subscribe for language!