Semantics Tense and Time
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64
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1957
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loginIn one of the most infamous episodes of twentieth-century intellectual history,the linguist-anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf argued (i) that language shapesthought and reality, (ii) that the tense system of a language can tell us about themetaphysics of time entailed by that language, and (iii) that for the Hopi, amongother cultures, the tense system (if it can be called that) is so radically differentfrom ours that those cultures may not have a concept of time at all. "I find itgratuitous," writes Whorf (1956, p. 57),
