In a 1936 paper, the fire inspector and amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf argued that because the Hopi language, spoken by the Native American tribe in Arizona, has no tense markers, the Hopi people only think in the present. They have “no notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum,” Whorf wrote, “in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future into a present and into a past.”
This isn’t true, as it turns out. The linguist Ekkehart Malotki demonstrated in a 1983 study that the Hopi make all sorts of temporal distinctions, even if they don’t do so with verb tenses. Still, the idea lives on, as does the idea that the Inuit perceive snow differently than non-Inuit because they have a multitude of words for snow. This, too, is bunk. The Inuit may have more words for snow than English does, as Laura Martin argued in 1986, but several words refer to a single phenomenon. In the end, the total number of ways of thinking about snow is not that different between Inuit and English speakers.
