Also they tended not to use nouns. They wouldn't say "lightning flashed," just "flashed."
Seems like it was Mojave, not sure.
The Maasai have/had little concept of travel or time. One of their tribesmen came to visit us in the UK and he told of how difficult it was to explain to his village that he had to be at the airport by a certain time. He had to use childbirth as a metaphor - as in told his villagers that he had to be there in time for the airplane to be born into the sky. Their usual perception of time is just one of "when it happens" (like "cest la vie" but explicitly time)
When do we eat? When we're hungry. When do we tend to the goats? When the goats need tending. Etc.
A pretty famous example is Aboriginal Australian langages where directions are always absolute (cardinal), not relative. So in e.g. Guugu Yimithirr you'd tell a guest that the food is in the living room on the southern table, rather than e.g. the table to the left of the entrance, or the table in front of the balcony.
In at least some of these langages, time is also cardinal: where most western cultures order timelines left to right, Kuuk Thaayorre speakers do so east to west.
IIRC there are also cultures where time goes back to front (because you can see the past so it’s obviously in front of you).
Is this actually true? From a quick look at Wikipedia, it doesn't seem to be.
This is almost certainly Hopi, which has been somewhat controversial ever since Whorf made a bunch of astounding claims about its expression of time. There’s a whole Wikipedia page about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy
[EDIT: Whoops, didn’t realise MaxBarraclough already mentioned this, sorry…]
That is also true for large English-speaking portions of the US.
I’d have to work backwards to figure out distance.
I'd like to see more of this kind measurement expression in our modern vernaculars.
For example, an acre could be defined as 43560 sq ft, or 4047 meters, or .405 hectares, but these are arbitrary and don't tell me much. A more useful definition of acre is "the amount of land that a pair of oxen can plow in a day". Then, as a farmer, I don't really care how many square feet or square cubits or square whatever it is. I have a domain-specific (farming) definition that actually communicates something more useful to me than arbitrary distance units.
Expressing distance by travel time is a similarly stupid concept. I can tell someone something is 15 minutes by car, but here I'm expressing time, not distance. If I tell someone something is 15 meters away I'm expressing distance. The separate concepts of time and distance allow me to precisely express whatever I need to.
Depending on where you are and the context of the conversation, knowing that something is fifteen miles away might tell you shockingly little about the experience of getting there. There are places where that distance in one direction might take hours, but in another direction minutes. As you might imagine, this can be important to know.
As soon as you can have multiple things that flash or multiple modes of transportation your language would become too ambiguous.
That's not to say the native Americans that speak it couldn't evolve the language to accommodate modern society, I'm sure they could.
I don’t know, it sounds like the exact opposite to me: I rarely care about the distance itself, and disambiguating would be as simple as pairing travel time and travel mode.
That is already a pretty normal thing to do e.g. “the grocery store is 5mn away”, possibly with the addendum that it’s on foot / by car / by bike if’s not obvious from context.
That's a ridiculous statement.
When you tell someone the grocery store is 5 mn away, you're expressing time, not distance, because you think they're interested in the time, not distance.
Yet you don't convert meters to minutes when you're telling someone how high they should build a wall. And you don't say "drill a hole 1/2000000 minutes by car wide".
That's the point of having a well-organized system of units, you can clearly express whatever you need to, always using the same system, and anyone who knows the system will understand it regardless of context.
Not being able to express distance as a separate concept is clearly inferior, since in our system we can express time, like in your example, but we can also express distance precisely when needed.
As a heads-up, contemporary thought is that no culture is "primitive". Primitive implies lesser