To take a more abstract example, when we learn a word such as week or weekend, we
are inheriting a conceptual system that operates with amounts of time as common
categories. Having words for units of time such as “two days” or “seven days” shows
that we can think of time (i.e. something abstract) in amounts, using noun phrases, in
the same way as “two people” or “seven books” (i.e. something physical). In another
world view, time may not be treated in this way. In the Hopi language, spoken in
Arizona, there were traditionally no terms equivalent to most of our time words and
phrases (two hours, thirty minutes) because our terms express concepts from a culture