¹ In 'The Punctual and Segmentative Aspects of Verbs in Hopi', Language 12. (1936), I referred to the assertions as tenses and called them factual or present-past, future, and generalized or usitative.

² There is no distinction in the reportive between past and present, for both are equally accomplished fact. What we call present tense (not counting our present form which corresponds to the nomic) is from the Hopi standpoint simply a report to others concerning a situation shared with them, this report being either redundant information, or used to call attention to, or tell about some fragment of the situation not fully shared. Thus to the Hopi ‘he is running' need not be different from 'he was running', for if both the speaker and listener can see the runner then the 'is’ of the former sentence means merely that the listener can see for himself what he is being told; he is being given redundant information, and this is the only difference from the latter sentence. Now the Hopi listener senses no lack in Hopi grammar for its not telling him that the information is redundant, when he can see for himself that it is. If the speaker can see the runner but the listener cannot, then the information is not redundant, but the situation in that case is one of rapidly relaying the information, which rules out the distinctive past meaning of ‘was’, and again the Hopi find our tense distinction irrelevant.

³ The orthography used for Hopi is phonemic and employs the American Anthropological Association symbols generally used for American Indian languages, with the following minor variations: k is somewhat fronted, and before a and ε sounds like k^v, c is the affricate ts, ? is glottal stop, v is bilabial and when syllable-final unvoiced, r is retroflex, untrilled, and slightly spirantal, and when syllable-final unvoiced, small capitals denote voiceless consonants which are separate phonemes, a dot under a vowel denotes the short, and lack of a mark the medium grade of the Hopi three-quantity vowel system, ′ ('high accent') denotes raised pitch and fairly strong stress and on monosyllabic words is not marked but to be understood, ´ ('low accent') denotes a lower level of pitch and weak stress and is marked where it occurs on monosyllabic words. The mode suffixes and most of the particles have special pausal forms when they stand at the end of sentences; these are not given except for the suffix -qö?, which is used in an example.

⁴ This objective-case agentive clause is the one exception to the rule that disparity of subject requires the transrelative.

⁵ We may not here read ‘sensory’ for ‘objective’, for experiences which psychology would place at the level of percepts rather than sensations, or even at the level of simple concepts, do not require the concessive, though they are treated differently from sensations. They are the percepts (or simple concepts) of seeing an action or phenomenon of a type having a lexical name (verb), and are put in the indicative transrelative, while it is now the verb of seeing that is in the independent mode, e.g., 'I saw him run away', ‘I saw him shoot the bird'. It is a remarkable fact that the Hopi seem to recognize, in their language, a distinction of four types of received information which correspond roughly to gradings made by psychology: (1) sensory, e.g. ‘I see that it is red', 'I hear him fall', sensing-verb in transrelative, information-verb in indicative; (2) perceptual-conceptual, e.g. 'I see him fall', sensing-verb in independent, information-verb in transrelative; (3) overt linguistic, e.g. 'I heard that he fell’ (unconceded), sensing-verb in transrelative, information-verb in quotative; (4) pure conceptual, e.g. 'I see that it is new', 'I heard that he fell’ (a conceded truth), sensing-verb in transrelative, information-verb in concessive.

⁶ The realm of the might-as-well-not-have-been is, in a nutshell, that middle ground between positive and negative which the impotential represents. What we call the might-have-been is to the Hopi simply a part of this realm. It is the expectancy (potency, tendency, possibility, wish) that might as well not have been.