Of the essence!

"Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression in their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection: The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached...Even comparatively simple acts of perception are very much more at the mercy of the social patterns called words than we might suppose...We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation."

-Edward Sapir

This is the opening quote to linguist Benjamin Whorf's essay "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Language to Behavior," a text we read recently in my "Lost in Translation" course at Loyola with Robert Dewell. In this segment of our linguistics course, we addressed issues in translation as related to cultural perspective. But beyond this, through Whorfian thought we probed how our very language structures reflect our perceptions of time, space, matter, gender associations, etc. After breaking down some English idiomatic expressions, it became very clear that our cultural metaphor for time is something linear, but also fleshed out in space, a substance we can actively move forward through, or, conversely, something that moves towards us. Expressions such as "We are coming to the end of the year"/"The end is coming" or "We are approaching the end of the year"/"10 o'clock approaches" replace time metaphorically with location. The idea of time as a sacred commodity is also uncovered through our words "waste of time", "running out of time", "spend time", "give me your time", and though the expressions may seem innocent enough, there is much truth to this being the attitude of our culture. My time is precious. It is of the essence.

These suggestions of our worldview being tightly wrapped up in our language do not bear full meaning until cross-comparisons are made with other languages. According to Whorf, "the three-tense verb system of SAE (Standard Average European, i.e. the "romantic" languages) colors all our thinking about time." In class we learned of an interesting torque to the SAE idea of facing the future with the past behind you. In the Aymara culture, to gesture to the future one points to what is behind his back. He is facing his past, for it is what he can see. The future is unknown, and lurks indiscernible.

Other languages, such as the native Hopi language Whorf studied, do not hold temporally demarcated tenses, and so neither have a conception of time demarcated as such. The Hopi rather than viewing time as a chronological motion, perceive time as a "getting later", or an ever-accumulating present:"if we inspect consciousness we find no past, present, future, but a unity embracing complexity. EVERYTHING is in consciousness, and everything in consciousness is, and is together" (Whorf). The departures in the grammatical structures of time, reflect departures in conceptions of time, and therefore departures in worldview as to the best way to perform life within those parameters. "To us, for whom time is a motion on a space, unvarying repetition seems to scatter its force along a row of units of that space, and be wasted. To the Hopi, for whom time is not a motion but a 'getting later' of everything that has ever been done, unvarying repetition is not wasted but accumulated. It is storing up an invisible charge that holds over into later events" (Whorf). These differences may be clues to causes of cultural tension and prejudices. Our views of progress and efficiency will differ vastly, and we will be quick to point the finger at those operating in "Caribbean time" for being what we'd consider lazy. Perhaps they are just moving at the tick of a different clock, or no clock at all. And who's to say which is better?

If you have traveled and waited with a French or German tourist for a bus that does not arrive on schedule, you know well the outrage and personal affront that is felt when these differences in cultural concepts of time collide. How dare they steal my time! But maybe to the country hosts, moving slow in the heat is just fine, time to them is not that not that precious commodity, quantifiable as water in a glass, or a pound of rice but rather an ever-present we share...


Discussing these ideas with friend, as a writer he expressed a particular curiosity when it came to verb tense. He pondered: if you were to speak always in the present, would your perception of time change? Would it be possible to break from these paradoxical categories of past, present, future by changing speech? We have established that language affects worldview, at least according to many philosophers and linguists. It is also deemed to be true in the field of psychology that positive language creates a positive person. In short, thoughts, words, create worlds. Could this too be true for time?


In David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous, in the chapter titled "In the Landscape of Language" the "Dreamtime" of Aboriginal Australians is described: "It is a kind of time out of time, a time hidden beyond or even within the evident, manifest presence of the land...It is that time before the world itself was entirely awake (a time that still exists just below the surface of wakeful awareness)" (164). It is in the Dreamtime that the Ancestors sing the world into existence, and it is through the recitation of these songs by their descendants that the world is created anew.

I briefly refer to this here for its relevance to differences in perspectives of time, and how those concepts of time are carried through language. Not only do the Aborigines also hold an idea of the past layered under/in/throughout the present, but it is through the power of song that the world was created in Dreamtime, and through language that the singer is transported to Dreamtime, or rather Dreamtime rises in the present and is again. Words are powerful, create. And perhaps a diluted use of words in a culture in which they are no longer sacred makes for a diluted sense of reality. Sing, sing.