The Hopi and Time conít
The anthropologist Ekkehart Malotki, who studied the Hopi extensively, who reported this sentence, also showed that Hopi speech contains tense, metaphors for time, units of time, ways to quantify units of time, and words like ěancientî, ěquickî, ělong tim
No one is really sure how Whorf came up with his outlandish claims, but his limited, badly analyzed sample of Hopi speech and his long-time leanings toward mysticism must have contributed.