Whorf

In the early 20th century linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf thrilled his contemporaries by noting that the Hopi language, spoken by Native American people in what is now Arizona, had no words or grammatical elements to represent time.

Whorf argued that this meant Hopi speakers had no concept of time and experienced what an English speaker might call “the passage of time” in a completely different way.

To be fair to Whorf, even if his claims about Hopi were incorrect, there was significant merit in the questions he posed.

I talked about how this myth is one example of a widely debunked idea called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, named after the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf.

In the 20th century, the American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf elaborated this idea into a broader vision of how language structures thought.