Talk:Hopi time controversy

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A fact from Hopi time controversy appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 3 October 2012 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the linguist Ekkehart Malotki refuted the common myth that the Hopi have no concept of time?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2012/October. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Hopi time controversy.

Wikipedia

Is Malotki German?

Elsewhere Malotki is described as "polish american". Maybe the nationality should be scrapped unless there is some reliable source?88.114.154.216 (talk) 06:59, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Good point.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 10:48, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

May I ask which source describes him as such? this NYT piece desxcribes him as German Born American.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 15:13, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Let's see, I believe it was in some commentary. 88.114.154.216 (talk) 11:21, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Tenseless

The article notes that Hopi can be seen as "tenseless", suggesting that there may be a connection to a lack of concept of time. But Afrikaans essentially has only the present tense, and the people who speak it have an abundant concept of time. Is that worth mentioning? --Piledhigheranddeeper (talk) 21:46, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Only with a good reference, that preferably mentions the relation to Hopi. I don't mean to suggest that the fact that Hopi may be analyzed as tenseless (just as Chinese is) may suggest the lack of a concept of time. Even if they don't have tense they obviously have a concept of time. What recent Whorfian scholars argue is that Whorf's point was not that the hopi didn't have a concept of time, but that their concept of time was not the same concept that we have (With which Malotki in fact agrees). It seems to me that Malotki was reacting more to the myth about timeless Hopi than to what Whorf actually was arguing. Malotki is annoyed at the fact that people keep perpetuating the myth that the Hopi have no concept of time, and he then attributes that view to Whorf, and refutes it. But in fact Whorf's point was that they don't have a concept that corresponds exactly to "what we call time". I would like to get this point across with some more expansions to the last sections.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 23:47, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I can verify Afrikaans have a present/preterite tense system almost identical to that of English (and Danish).·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 23:57, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

"some cultural groups conceptualize the flow of time oppositely"

From the article: "Specifically, it has been shown that some cultural groups conceptualize the flow of time in a direction opposite to what is usual for speakers of English and other Indo-European languages, i.e. that the future is in front of the speaker and the past behind.[12][13]"

While this is accurate, perhaps, it hardly seems relevant to the Hopi time controversy. Moreover, this kind of conceptualization is present in (Mandarin, at least) Chinese, which is the most widely-spoken language in the world: "the day after tomorrow" in Mandarin is "behind-day"; "the day before yesterday" is "front-day." It seems to me as though the writer of this sentence is trying to cast some measure of doubt on the conclusion that Hopi does recognize time by bringing up information that is not strictly relevant. --Duriancupcakes (talk) 23:28, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The purpose of this sentence is that I intend to expand the article by adding a final section describing the research into cross cultural and cross linguistic differences in the grammaticalization of temporal relations. This research is not directly relevant to the hopi time controversy, but it is relevant for readers to know that the research has moved on to questions about how speakers of different languages conceptualize time instead of asking whether a given group has a concept of time or not. Some descriptions of the debate stop at Malotki and conclude that everybody have the same concept of time and that all languages have tense - we now know that to be false. I don't want reader to come away from reading the article by thinking that all languages have tense and think of time as flowing from future to past. While Hopi may do it ins pite of Whorf - other languages don't. There is cultural and linguistic variation - not exactly of the type that Whorf described, but the knowledge that we now have we would not have had if not people like Whorf had first pointed out that the European way od grammaticalizing tense is not universally valid. That is my reaosning behind this. Also some of the literature on cross cultural differences in temporal cognition and grammar explkicltiy takes Whorf's questions on Hopi as the starting point and work within the linguistic relativity paradigm sparked by Whorf.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 23:44, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I was about to comment something similar... how are Aymara time metaphors relevant to the Whorf issue at all? I believe that at the end of the day, the problem is that Whorf is ambiguous enough in his expression that in places he can be thought to say that he believes that people experience time in different ways, or perhaps not at all in other cultures. At times it seems that he only means that time is conceptualized and talked about using distinct metaphors in distinct cultures. Malotki's work cites numerous passages of Whorf which are quite difficult in the latter sense. Many other works talk about "strong" and "weak" Whorfianism, which also probably stems from the fact that Whorf's written expression is so poor. 88.114.154.216 (talk) 11:43, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, the Sinha data-could just as well be used to refute Whorf's points... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.214.69.84 (talk) 11:28, 5 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Definition of "linguistic relativity"

The intro states

"The Hopi time controversy is the academic debate about how the Hopi language grammaticalizes the concept of time, and about whether the differences between the ways the English and Hopi languages describe time is an example of linguistic relativity or not". Then it links to the linguistic relativity page.

Is there really such a debate at all? The article says that Malotki refutes Whorf's position. Does it mean to imply that Malotki refutes the idea of linguistic relativity or not? And what exactly does this mean? What is "an example of linguistic relativism"? Should this be interpreted as meaning that the article wants to say that Malotki does not believe that Hopi language expresses any "structure of language [which] affects the ways in which its speakers conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view, or otherwise influences their cognitive processes" (from said linguistic relativity page link)? Is that what this is trying to say? 88.114.154.216 (talk) 12:00, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Your question would be answered by reading the article. He does not refute the idea of linguistic relativity because that idea does not hinge on whether or not Whorf's Hopi example was right. Further more there isn't agreement about whether Malotki's study in fact refuted Whorf claims. Also Malotki clearly states that the Hopi concept of time is different from English and that the way they grammaticalize time is also different - his main claim is that the tendency to use spatial metaphors to conceptualize time is universal.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 12:50, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately it is not, and even if it were, that's not enough.88.114.154.216 (talk) 12:38, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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New user

added a 'citation needed' for the first sentence in "The Hopi Language" section. (I'm doing this for a class). --Escxobar (talk) 04:49, 6 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Colonialist article ignores Hopi scholarship

This article in its entirety speaks only of colonialistic debates, includes needless repetition of debunked and harmful stereotypes without mention of how they perpetuate the genocide of Native Americans in the US and indigenous peoples worldwide, and makes not even a single mention of Hopi efforts to reclaim and restory Hopi linguistic scholarship. 2405:6580:2FE0:8500:B8D6:6826:C1ED:6EBF (talk) 00:10, 7 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]