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ENGLISH AND ITS RELATED LANGUAGES 

have three tenses—past, present, and future (“it was,” “it is,” “it will be”)—plus the fancier compound tenses such as “it will have been.” Having these tenses encourages [those] to think of time as so many ducks in a row. Time past is made up of uniform units of time—days, weeks, months, years—and the future is similarly measured out. This division of time is essentially artificial, since people can only experience the present. Past and future are only abstractions, but Westerners think of them as real because their language virtually forces them to do so. This view of time has given rise to the fondness in Western cultures for diaries, records, annals, histories, clocks, calendars, wages paid by the hour or day, and elaborate timetables for the use of future time. Time is continually quantified. 

[There are cultures that] do not behave this way; when they start to weave a mat they are not concerned about when it will be completed. They work on it desultorily, then quit, then begin again; the finished product may take weeks. This casual progress is not laziness but a result of [their] view of time—one symptom of the fact that their language does not have the past, present, and future tenses. Instead it possesses two modes of thought: the objective, that is, things that exist now, and the subjective, things that can be thought about and therefore belong to a state of becoming. Things do not become in terms of a future measured off in days, weeks, months. Each thing that is becoming has its own individual life rhythms, growing or declining or changing in much the same manner as a plant grows according to its inner nature.

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ANTHROPOLOGIST DAVID S. THOMPSON, DISCUSSING LINGUIST BENJAMIN LEE WHORF’S ASSERTION THAT WORDS AND GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE SHAPE REALITY.

THE SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS: WORLDS SHAPED BY WORDS