Hopi has no nouns at all That one sentence makes me doubt the entire essay. No language can get along without nouns. The Wikipedia page on the Hopi language ha

Hopi has no nouns at all That one sentence makes me doubt the entire essay. No language can get along without nouns. The Wikipedia page on the Hopi language has examples of nouns. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_language Can you imagine any normal person being able to live their life without representing physical objects? That isn't just a functional language; that would be like a programming language without variables or data structures. There's a trope in North American culture of supposing that Native Americans were or are somehow holier than other kinds of people, or even had access to some special states of consciousness. Their cultures are nearly destroyed so it's hard to check that. But I think it's silly and probably kind of patronizing. There is some work which does suggest that a Neolithic tribe can have very different concepts of time and number, but this is still a point of controversy. I don't believe we're going to find the key to enlightenment here, just a different way of thinking, which is way more important than a fantasy for nirvana via linguistics, IMO. Although, I will forgive this author because it's not central to his argument, and he has a point about how Native American lifestyle was the antithesis of modernity.