Re: Time

# 1 wrote at 2004-12-22 20:11:30 (-0500)

 > May someone be able to give me a website where I could find a
 > grammar of a language (it can be a conlang) where there is no time
 > like in Hopi (are there other languages in the family of Hopi that
 > does it?)?
 >
 > It is a concept I would like to understand but I've not be able to
 > find a good website about it.
 >
 > The only things I know is that they divide the world in manifested
 > and the un-manifested and that they base the verbs on the duration
 > instead of the moment and on the degree of certainty.<
 >
 > Someone has a website to help me?

It's not really correct to say that there's "no time" in Hopi - even
Whorf didn't say that[1].  It's clearly Whorf's ideas about Hopi that
you're thinking of - I don't know if you've read any of his work
directly, but the most directly relevant paper to time in Hopi, "The
Relation of Habitual Thought and Behaviour to Language", is online
here [2].  If you get a copy of _Language, Thought and Reality_, there
are various sections of Hopi grammar (as described by Whorf) scattered
through it.

Anyway, most linguists these days don't agree with Whorf.  There's
supposed to be some later research contradicting Whorf's findings
about time in Hopi, but I don't know anything about it in detail.

There's a grammatical sketch of Hopi here[3].

(If I remember and understand Whorf correctly, Hopi may be one of those
languages without a category of tense, but which makes roughly the
same distinctions through the interaction of a realis/irrealis modal
category and a perfective/imperfective aspectual category.  This is,
at any rate, a fairly common system.  Such analyses have been made of
Tagalog[4], for instance.

		 perfective	imperfective
             +----------------+---------------
irrealis     |	"subjunctive" |	 "future"
             +----------------+---------------
realis	     |	  "past"      |	 "present"
)


[1] Well, in a sense he did, but he meant something specific.  He
    didn't mean that Hopi was incapable of talking about temporal
    matters. (Well, not in the paper linked below, anyway.)

[2] http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/Secondary/RelThoughtLanguage.htm

[3] http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dick/Summaries/Languages/Hopi.pdf

[4] http://www.linguistics.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/~himmelmann/tagalog_Curzon.pdf