a North American Indian language of the Uto-Aztecan family, spoken by the Hopi
people of northeastern Arizona. Hopi is of particular interest because of the way in
which concepts of time and space are expressed in it: in its verb forms, for example, an
event at a great distance from the speaker is characterized as having occurred in the
distant past; the shorter the spatial distance, the less the temporal distance is seen to
be. Hopi verbs have no real tense but instead are distinguished by aspect (the length
of time an event lasts), validity (whether an action is completed or ongoing, expected,
or regular and predictable), and clause-linkage (giving the temporal relationship of two
or more verbs). In addition, verbs can be inflected to show that an action occurs in
repeated segments: e.g., ríya ("it makes a quick spin") and riyáyata ("it is spinning").
In the 1930s the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf seized on these characteristics of the
verbs of the Hopi language to illustrate the "Whorfian hypothesis": language closely
governs our experience of reality. The Hopi language frames the way in which the Hopi
talk about their universe. The same holds true, in Whorf 's view, for all individual
languages and people.
Definitions
ko.yaa.nis.katsi (from the HopiLanguage), n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life
disintegrating. 4. life out of balance. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of
living.
Translation of the Hopi Prophecies Sung in KOYAANISQATSI
"If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster."
"Near the Day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the
sky."
"A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky which could burn the
land and boil the oceans."
HopiLanguage