Can you imagine a language that does not distinguish between past and future? In the Hopi language, spoken by the Hopi Native American people in Arizona, time is not treated as something linear but as a cycle. There is no future or past tense in the same sense as in most Indo-European languages. Instead, the Hopi perceive reality in terms of the “manifested” and the “non-manifest.” What does it mean for Hopi speakers? In practice, this means that sentences which in English or Polish would be clearly anchored in time can have ambiguous meanings in Hopi. For example, in English, we would say, “Tomorrow I will go to the market,” which clearly indicates the future. Meanwhile, in Hopi, the construction would be more descriptive, such as, “I am going to the market,” with the future implied by context or possibly by a time-indicating word, but not by the verb itself.
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