Atlas Trail
From Proto-Uto-Aztecan to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
A single language family carries its reconstructed proto-language, its living member tongues, and a famous claim about how grammar shapes thought. This trail follows Uto-Aztecan from its reconstructed five-thousand-year-old ancestor, through Hopi and Nahuatl, to Benjamin Lee Whorf's grammatical study of Hopi and the linguistic relativity debate it launched.
Stop 1 of 4.
Language Families
The family itself: some sixty languages from the Great Basin to central Mexico, reconstructed back to a single ancestor roughly five thousand years old.
Stop 2 of 4.
Languages
A Northern Uto-Aztecan language of northeastern Arizona, and the language at the center of the Sapir-Whorf case.
Stop 3 of 4.
Linguists
The linguist whose grammatical study of Hopi tense and cosmology argued that language structure shapes habitual thought.
Stop 4 of 4.
Languages
The largest living Uto-Aztecan language, the tongue of the Aztec empire, and a distant Southern-branch relative of Hopi.
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