The World According to Whorf

By Tom Bartlett. In 1938 a chemical engineer and amateur linguist named Benjamin Whorf visited a Hopi reservation in Arizona and concluded that the residents there had no words for time. No “was” or “will”; only “is.” For Whorf, and for many descriptive linguists who followed him, the supposed lack of past and future tenses in the Hopi language was more than just a grammatical curiosity. It revealed something deep and meaningful about the speakers themselves. The Hopi were a people permanently in the present. Read more...