The Whorf Hypothesis

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, R. Rankin wrote:
> Personally, I think he had adopted the stereotype of the Indian who
> does everything on "Indian Time".  I simply don't believe that that
> aspect of culture relates to language at all.  Those languages that
> don't mark tense DO mark "time" using temporal conjunctions and
> adverbs.  I would bet large sums that, if we could go back to Western
> Europe before timepieces became common, that we would find that the
> speakers of those IE languages did everything on "Indian Time" too.

Someone asked me something like this recently and I came to about the same
conclusions.  How anal you are about time depends on how easily you have
access to instruments for measuring it precisely.  The availability of
such instruments is a very recent phenomenon.  In spite of this, Dakota
has plenty of idioms for 'on time', 'at the appointed time', 'in good
time' and so on.  Everyone appreciates timeliness.  They just differ in
how precisely they reckon it.

Even with fairly ready access to time pieces, several members of my family
are well known to operate on a less precise definition of time than
others.  People often tell me to arrive an hour before they expect to need
me, for example.

JEK