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From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: net.ai,net.nlang
Subject: Re: natural language deficiencies?
Message-ID: <1163@dciem.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 25-Oct-84 17:20:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: dciem.1163
Posted: Thu Oct 25 17:20:23 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 25-Oct-84 18:51:54 EDT
References: <801@aplvax.UUCP>
Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada
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It is well-known that the Hopi (American Indian) language only has a
present tense, there are no past or future tenses for their verbs.
Surely this is a language deficiency.
============
If I remember correctly, Whorf pointed out that the Hopi don't really
have verbs.  Rather, they differentiate between events that last longer
than a cloud (nouns) and shorter events (verbs). Presumably they also
distinguish between events you know about (past+present[which is now past
because you are talking about it]) and events you don't know about
(counterfactuals and/or future).  Does anyone know more directly about
this?
The nature of the Hopi verb/noun tense/factual distinction is interesting
because Whorf used the non-distinction between noun and verb to
argue that the Hopi probably see the world in a different way.
-- 

Martin Taylor
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