ordinal vs. cardinal "counts"

[Jim Wilce]

Thanks to Michael Silverstein and Penny Lee, my misconstrual of Whorf has
come to light, much to my relief.  Mrs. Sekaquaptewa's mention of the
"fourth time" is absolutely in keeping with what Whorf wrote (1956: 148):

" Time [in Hopi] is mainly reckoned 'by day' Š or 'by night (tok), which
words are not nouns but tensors, the first formed on a root 'light, day,'
the second on a root 'sleep.'  The count is by ORDINALS.  This is not the
pattern of counting a number of different men or things, even thought they
appear successively, for, even then, they COULD gather into an assemblage.
It is the pattern of counting successive reappearances of the SAME man or
thing, incapable of forming an assemblage."  148

Whorf, Benjamin Lee
	1956	The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language.
In Language, Thought, and Reality:  Selected writings of Benjamin Lee
Whorf. J.B. Carroll, ed. Pp. 134-159. New York: John Wiley.

Again, thanks to Lee and Silverstein for pointing me to that passage.  I
append their comments below.

Best,

Jim

Penny Lee wrote:
 I spent a lot of time thinking about
the 'Hopi time' question some years ago. You may be interested in my
article on Hopi tensors which deals somewhat with the issue, but not the
exact phenomenon you mention. Whorf's reasoning about tensors, and Hopi
ways of dealing with what we call 'time' is perfectly coherent - you just
have to understand where he's coming from and Malotki's examples fit in
nicely with Whorf's reasoning in my opinion, even though M argues
differently. The article is: Lee, P. (1991). Whorf's Hopi tensors: Subtle
articulators in the language/thought nexus? Cognitive linguistics, 2,
123-147.

With regard to your example, and without going back to Whorf right at the
moment as I don't have the text handy as I write, doesn't he say that Hopi
(in the 1930s) DID talk in terms of ordinals rather than counting concrete
units (see also Lucy 1992 this question - I thought he got Whorf right on
this matter.) As I recall, Whorf said that you won't find references to
e.g. six days as though several (nominal) days could be brought into a
single time together but that the Hopi (non-nominal) construction means in
effect, that daytime came round a sixth [time], the word concerned being a
kind of adverbial modified by the ordinal in such a way that it is
impossible to translate exactly into idiomatic English which requires the
word 'time'.

Michael Silverstein wrote:
 If you read Whorf -- including his grammatical sketch -- more
carefully, you will see that ordinal counts are consistent with
cumulativity and intensity "tensors."  The thing he was contrasting was
cardinal counts of phase-time intervals as abstract measures, e.g., of
labor time, as we've now come to understand about the transformations to
capitalism in the Middle Ages [cf. Jaques Le Goff and other "Annaliste"
historians].

Jim Wilce, Assistant Professor
Anthropology Department
Box 15200
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff AZ 86011-5200

fax 520/523-9135
office ph. 520/523-2729
email jim.wilce at nau.edu
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jmw22/ (includes information on my 1998 book,
Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural
Bangladesh, ISBN 0-19-510687-3)
http://www.nau.edu/asian
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