Some Verbal Categories of Hopi

Abstract

In the earlier stages of work on the Hopi language I had the pleasant feeling of being in familiar linguistic territory. Here, wondrous to relate, was an exotic language cut very much on the pattern of IndoEuropean; a language with clearly distinct nouns, verbs, and adjectives, with voices, aspects, tense-moods, and no outr6 categories, no gender-like classes based on shape of objects, no pronouns referring to tribal status, presence, absence, visibility, or invisibility. But in course of time I found it was not all such plain sailing. The sentences I made up and submitted to my Hopi informant were usually wrong. At first the language seemed merely to be irregular. Later I found it was quite regular, in terms of its own patterns. After long study and continual scrapping of my pre-conceived ideas the true patterning emerged at last. I found the experience highly illuminating, not only in regard to Hopi but as bearing on the whole subject of grammatical categories and concepts. It happens that Hopi categories are just enough like Indo-European ones to give at first a deceptive impression of identity marred with distressing irregularities, and just enough different to afford, after they have been correctly determined, a new viewpoint toward the, on the whole, similar distinctions made in many modern and ancient Indo-European tongues. It was to me almost as enlightening to see English from the entirely new angle necessitated in order to translate it into Hopi as it was to discover the meanings of the Hopi forms themselves. This was notably true for the four types of verbal category herein discussed. It will be well to outline first the following general distinctions: (1) OVERT CATEGORY; one marked by a morpheme which appears in every sentence containing the category, vs. COVERT CATEGORY; not marked in sentences in general, but requiring a distinctive treatment in certain types of sentence, e.g. English genders. (2) WORD CATEGORY; a category (overt or covert or mixed) which delimits one of a primary hierarchy of word classes each of limited membership (not coterminous with entire vocabulary), e.g. the familiar 'parts of speech' of Indo-European and many other languages, vs. 275