“In Benjamin Lee Whorf’s excellent book, Thought and Reality, that I strongly recommend, the Hopi language is analysed in fascinating details. For one thing, Hopi has no tenses as we know them, because the Hopi view of life doesn’t fraction time into units the way we do. Instead of minutes ticking away, picture the minutes being strung so that every “present” moment is a string of all the minutes that have passed already. Whorf explains that the Hopi language permits a better understanding of quantum physics than European languages do. Think about it: traditional science was born from the view of the world imposed by European languages, binary and fragmented. Quantum physics challenge our minds because we’re not used to conceive of something being both wave and particle at the same time. Hopi accommodates such apparent paradoxes and is in many other ways suited to alternative scientific approaches.”

The above passage is from an article by Joumana Medlej. I learned a bit about Benjamin Lee Whorf’s linguistic relativity today thanks to the above article and this great lecture from John Sweeney

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Painting by Michael Rubin

Tags:Benjamin Lee WhorfHopi LanguageJoumana Medlejlinguistic relativityphysics