Hey Roxy!
Their concept of time seems to differ from language to language…Mohawk has a quite elaborate system of past tenses. One thing I have noticed involves a (near?) universal theme of not defining the future…saying “i will go catch a fish” involves such prophetic arrogrance, apparently, that it seems a rather modern notion. ‘I will go fishing’, however, reflects what one can actually control. In Chinuk jargon you can’t say ‘I want to go fishing’, you can only say ‘I will’, another odd layer. One can’t impotently ‘wish’ for a future activity, one either will do it, or not.
Benjamin Lee Whorf has lots of interesting things to say about Hopi concepts of past/present/future activity, in his book Language, Thought, and Reality. He says they divide the world into ‘manifest’ and ‘unmanifest’. Present and past falls into ‘manifest’, that which we can see manifested around us. The future growth of a tree, or prayers, or a not-yet-arrived season, falls into ‘unmanifested’. He insisted the importance of the distinction here, between a ‘manifestation’ paradigm, and a ‘time-line’ paradigm. One also refers to one’s thoughts and in the ‘unmanifested’ tense. If I understood it better, I’d go on about it more, it sounds so intriguing. Manifest and Unmanifest have no particular ‘order’ (as in one coming first and the other second), they simply denote our relationshiop to experience and observation. I feel like I should go dig the book up and give this a better description…I’ll probably learn more from another crack at it.
I find these semantic (semantic signifying ‘meaning’, not ‘pickyness’, an unfortunate and absurd connotation) differences between indigenous and modern languages fascination. One time, studying a little Lakota, I read in Albert White Hat’s Lakota instruction book an anectdote about some Lakota adults and a couple of teenagers at a community center. Everyone speaking in lakota, the teenager had just finished giving voicing some opinion. One of the elders leaned into another and murmured, “he speaks pretty good english”. Meaning: everything we take for granted in english, the ‘it’ of objectified reality, the preponderance of nouns, even the order in which our language conceives and speaks about reality, marks it as a profoundly different mental activity than the indigenous. Thus people talk about three different Lakota languages: Urban, Evangelical, and Traditional. The urban and evangelical share sounds and some structure, perhaps, with Traditional, but it ends there. Just think what would happen to hopi if urban schooled hopi kids decided that ‘manifested’ just meant ‘past tense’, and changed their languaging accordingly. You’d lose an entire sphere of wisdom and perspective.