Blown Away

"The so-called real world turns out to be not nearly so independent of human consciousness as was once thought. Even the most basic categories of grammar cannot be assumed to be universal. It's natural for us to conjugate & decline from singular to plural, because we begin with the one and go on to the many. Yet the Wintu Indians of California, as Dorothy Lee points out, recognize & perceive first the group and only secondarily the delimited one. They conjugate & decline from plural to singular and sometimes make no linguistic distinction between the one & the many or between the particular & the general."

Edmund Carpenter, Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me, 1972.