The Non-western Perception of Time

A Hopi woman's dance which was shot in 1879.
The dance is related to the Hopi's perception of time.

This is an excerpt from the Keywords: Better than yelling at the T.V. blog about a Benjamin Lee Whorf (a linguist), who in the early 20th century spent some time with the Hopi Indian tribe.

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So for the phase nouns we have made a formless item, “time.” We have made it by using “a time,” i.e. an occasion or a phase, in the pattern of a mass noun, just as from “a summer” we make “summer” in the pattern of a mass noun. Thus with our binomial formula we can say and think “a moment of time, a second of time, a year of time.” Let me again point out that the pattern is simply that of “a bottle of milk” or “a piece of cheese.” Thus we are assisted to imagine that “a summer” actually contains or consists of such-and-such a quantity of “time.”

In Hopi however all phase terms, like “summer, morning,” etc., are not nouns but a kind of adverb, to use the nearest SAE analogy. They are a formal part of speech by themselves, distinct from nouns, verbs, and even other Hopi “adverbs.” … One does not say “it’s a hot summer” or “summer is hot”; summer is not hot, summer is only WHEN conditions are hot, WHEN heat occurs. One does not say “THIS summer,” but “summer now” or “summer recently.” There is no objectification, as a region, an extent, a quantity, of the subjective duration feeling. Nothing is suggested about time except the perpetual “getting later” of it. And so there is no basis here for a formless item answering to our “time.”

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Read on at http://keywords.oxus.net/archives/2004/08/21/whorf/