Sapir-Whorf: Syntactical Effects

Whorf also proposed that the structure of language critically influenced our thought. He argued that we can only think in certain ways because we can only talk in certain ways.  

Whorf claimed that Hopi language had only the present tense and understood action in terms of movement rather than time.

He said the Hopi: "had no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equal rate out of a future, through the present, and into a past."

Whorf argued that things like Newtonian concepts of space, time, are part of Western culture because they can be expressed in Western language. The Hopi, since their language does not express time, could not have developed them.

The implication is that because people who speak different languages must live in different cognitive worlds.