Benjamin Lee Whorf (April 24, 1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts – July 26, 1941) was an American linguist.^{[1] [2][3][4]} Whorf is widely known for his ideas about linguistic relativity, the hypothesis that language influences thought. An important theme in many of his publications, he has been credited as one of the fathers of this approach, often referred to as the "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis", named after him and his mentor Edward Sapir. Originally educated as a chemical engineer, he took up an interest in linguistics, studying with Sapir at Yale University. In the last ten years of his life he dedicated his spare time to linguistic studies, doing field work on Native American languages in the United States and Mexico. He managed to become one of the most influential linguists of his time, even while still working as a fire inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. He wrote a grammar of the Hopi language, studies of Nahuatl dialects, Maya hieroglyphic writing, and the first attempt at a reconstruction of Uto-Aztecan. He also published many articles in the most prestigious linguistic journals, many of them dealing with the ways in which he saw that different linguistic systems affected the thought systems and habitual behaviour of language users.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

The son of Harry and Sarah (Lee) Whorf, Benjamin Lee Whorf was born on april 24th 1897 in Winthrop, Massachussets. Harry Church Whorf was an artist, intellectual and designer - first working as a commercial artist and later as a dramatist. Benjamin had two younger brothers, John and Richard, both went on to become distinguished artists. John became a painter and illustrator, Richard became an actor in films such as Yankee Doodle Dandy and later Emmy nominated television director of such shows as The Beverly Hillbillies. Benjamin was the intellectual of the three and at a young age he made chemical experiments with his father's photographic equipment.^[5] He was also an avid reader, interested in botany (learning the latin nomenclature of thousands of plants), astrology and of Middle American prehistory. He read William H. Prescott's Conquest of Mexico several times. At the age of 17 he began keeping a copious diary in which he recorded his thoughts and dreams.^[6]

Career in fire prevention[link]

He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1918 with a degree in chemical engineering; his academic performance there was of average, not exceptional, quality. Shortly thereafter, he began work as a fire prevention engineer (i.e., an inspector) for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, a job for which he seemed to have a particular knack, and for which he was highly commended by his employers. For his job he traveled around conducting inspections of production facilities all across New England. One anecdote has it that arriving at a chemical plant he was denied access by the director who stated that he could not let anyone see the production procedure which was a trade secret. Having been told what the plant produced, Whorf produced a chemical formula on a piece of paper telling the director "I think this is what you're doing". The surprised director asked Whorf how he knew about the secret procedure, and he simply answered "You couldn't do it in any other way" ^[7] Whorf was also excellent at attracting new customers to the Fire Insurance Company, impressed by his thorough inspections and recommendations. In 1920 he married Celia Inez Peckham who became the mother of his three children Raymond Ben, Robert Peckham and Celia Lee.^[8]

Early interest in religion and language[link]

Whorf was a spiritual man throughout his life time although there has been some debate about which religion exactly he followed. Some sources have described him as a devout Methodist Episcopalian, impressed with fundamentalist ideas at an early age. The main reason for this belief seems to have been that as a young man he produced a manuscript titled "Why I have discarded Evolution", which has sometimes been taken by creationists to indicate that his later work critiquing science might be considered supportive of creationism^{[9][n 1]}. Others however have noted that Whorf's paper discarding evolution in fact showed more influence by the mystic writings of Madam Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical movement, and that Whorf's father seem to have shared Blavatsky's belief that the Maya originated in Atlantis^{[10][11][n 2]}. Whorf's own Children remembered being disadvantaged in school by their lack of Biblical knowledge, and their attendance at theosophical summer camps^[12], suggesting that Whorf's adult engagement with Christianity, if any, was superficial. In his adult years Whorf's spiritual leanings seem to have be mostly drawn towards the teachings of the Theosophical Society, a nonsectarian organization which, based on Buddhist and Hindu teachings, promotes the view of the world as an interconnected whole and the unity and brotherhood of humankind "without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color".^[13] Some of Whorf's unpublished manuscripts on spiritual matters also suggests that he was influenced by Blavatsky's ideas about cosmic evolution which sees reincarnation as the source of evolution of Human races towards continuously higher forms. Theosophy is also characterized by seeing no basic dichotomy between science and mysticism, but understanding the world relativistically and holistically - something that may have appealed particularly to Whorf. Whorf himself said that "of all groups of people with whom I have come in contact, Theosophical people seem the most capable of becoming excited about ideas--new ideas." ^[14]

Around 1924 he first became interested in linguistics, originally his interest was to undertake an in depth semantic analysis of Biblical texts, which Whorf thought would reveal new layers of meaning.^[15] Inspired by the esoteric work La langue hebraïque restituée by Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, he began a semantic and grammatical analysis of Biblical Hebrew. WHorf's early mansucripts on Hebrew and Maya have been described as showing a considerable degree of mysticism, and an almost cabbalistic approach to the study of meaning and writing^[10].

Early studies in Mesoamerican linguistics[link]

Whorf studied Biblical linguistics mainly at the Watkinson Library (Now Hartford Public Library), this library had an extensive collection of materials about Native American linguistics and Folklore, originally collected by James Hammond Trumbull.^[16] It was at the Watkinson library that Whorf became friends with the young boy John B. Carroll, who later went on to study Psychology under B. F. Skinner, and who in 1956 edited and published a selection of Whorf's essays as Language, Thought and Reality (Carroll 1956). The collection rekindled Whorf's interest in Mesoamerican antiquity and he began studying the Nahuatl language in 1925, and later, beginning in 1928, he studied the collections of Maya hieroglyphic texts. Quickly becoming conversant with the materials he began to a scholarly dialogue with Mesoamericanists such as Alfred Tozzer, the Maya archaeologist at Harvard University and Herbert J. Spinden of the Brooklyn Museum.^[16]

In 1928 he first presented a paper at the International Congress of Americanists in which he presented his translation of a Nahuatl document held at the the Peabody Museum at Harvard. This paper was titled "An Aztec account of the Toltec decline", and it generated considerable media attention with local newspapers reporting that Whorf had "unlocked the mysteries" that had baffled other scholars. At the same conference he also presented another paper titled "Aztec linguistics" in which he argued that the Nahuatl language could be described as as oligosynthetic. Oligosynthesis was a typological concept defined by Whorf referring to languages that can be analyzed as consisting of an exceedingly small number of basic grammatical building blocks (morphemes) that in turn combine to form the entirety of the language. This description of Nahuatl has not been considered correct by later scholars, but nonetheless it showed Whorf's innovative approach and sharp analytical mind.^[16] He also began undertaking studies in comparative linguistics of the Uto-Aztecan language family, which had recently been demonstrated by Edward Sapir. In addition to Nahuatl, Whorf studied the Piman and Tepecano languages, in close correspondence with linguist J. Alden Mason. ^[16]

Fieldstudies in Mexico[link]

Because of the promise of his work on Uto-Aztecan, Tozzer and Spinden advised Whorf to apply for a grant with the Social Science Research Council to support his research. Whorf suggested that he might use the money to travel to Mexico to procure Aztec manuscripts for the Watkinson library, but Tozzer stated that the time in Mexico would be better spent working on documenting modern Nahuatl dialects.^[16] In his application Whorf proposed to establish the oligosynthetic nature of the Nahuatl language. Before leaving Whorf presented the paper "Stem series in Maya" at the conference of the Linguistic Society of America, in which he argued that in the Mayan languages syllables carried symbolic content. The SSRC gave Whorf the grant and in 1930 he traveled to Mexico City where Professor Robert H Barlow put him in contact with several speakers of Nahuatl to serve as his informants, among them Mariano Rojas of Tepoztlán and Luz Jimenez of Milpa Alta. The outcome of the trip to Mexico was Whorf's sketch of Milpa Alta Nahuatl which was published only after his death, and an article on a series of Aztec pictograms found at the Tepozteco monument at Tepoztlán, Morelos in which he noted similarities in form an meaning between Aztec and Maya day signs.

At Yale[link]

Edward Sapir, Whorf's mentor in linguistics at Yale.

Untill his return from Mexico in 1930 Whorf had been entirely autodidact in linguistic theory and field methodology, yet he had already made a name for himself in Middle American linguistics. Whorf had already met Sapir, the leading US linguist of the day, at professional conferences, but in 1931 Sapir came to Yale from the University of Chicago to take the position as Professor of Anthropology. Alfred Tozzer sent Sapir a copy of Whorf's paper on "Nahuatl tones and saltillo", Sapir replied stating that it "should by all means be published" ^[17], however it was not published until 1993 when it was prepared for publication by Lyle Campbell and Frances Karttunen^[18].

Whorf took Sapir's first course at Yale on "American Indian Linguistics". He enrolled in a program of graduate studies, nominally working towards a PhD in linguistics, but he never actually attempted to obtain a degree, satisfying himself with participating in the intellectual community around Sapir. At Yale, Whorf joined the circle of Sapir's students that counted such luminary linguists as Morris Swadesh, Mary Haas, Harry Hoijer, G. L. Trager and Charles F. Voegelin. Whorf took on a central role among Sapir's students and was well respected by all. Sapir had a profound influence on Whorf's thinking. Sapir's earliest writings on the had earlier espoused views of the relation between thought and language stemming from the Humboldtian tradition which he acquired through Franz Boas which saw language as the historical embodiment of volksgeist, or ethnic worldview. But Sapir had since become influenced by a current of logical positivism, such as that of Bertrand Russel and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein, particularly through C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards' "The Meaning of Meaning". This had caused him to adopt a view of natural language as potentially obscuring, rather than facilitating, the ability of the human mind to perceive and describe the world as it really is. In this view this could only be accomplished through formal logics. During his stay at Yale, Whorf acquired this current of thought partly from Sapir and partly through his own readings of Russell and Ogden and Richards ^[10]. As Whorf became more influenced by positivist science he also distanced himself from some approaches to language and meaning that he saw as soft and lacking in rigour and insight. One of these was Polish Philosopher Alfred Korzybski's General semantics which was espoused in the US by Stuart Chase who frequently sought out a reluctant Whorf who considered him "utterly incompetent by training and background to handle such a subject."^[19]. Ironically Chase would later write the foreword for Carroll's collection of Whorf's writings.

Work on Hopi and descriptive linguistics[link]

Sapir also encouraged Whorf to continue his work on the historical and descriptive linguistics of Uto-Aztecan, and Whorf published several articles on that topic in this period, some of them with G. L. Trager who had become his close friend. Whorf took a special interest in the Hopi language and started working with Ernest Naquayouma, a speaker of Hopi from Toreva village living in Manhattan, New York. Whorf credited Naquayouma as the source of most of his information on the Hopi language, although in 1938 he also managed to make a short field trip to the village of Mishongnovi, on the Second Mesa of the Hopi Reservation in Arizona.^[20]

In 1936, Whorf was appointed Honorary Research Fellow in Anthropology at Yale, and he was invited by Franz Boas to serve on the committee of the Society of American Linguistics (later LSA). In 1937, Yale awarded him the Sterling Fellowship ^[21]. He was a Lecturer in Anthropology from 1937 through 1938, replacing Sapir who was gravely ill. He lectured for the graduate students on "Problems of American Indian Linguistics". In 1938 he elaborated with the assistance of G. L. Trager a report on the progress of linguistic research at the department of anthropology at Yale. This report includes some of Whorf's influential contributions to linguistic theory such as the concept of the allophone and of covert grammatical categories. Lee (1996) has argued that this report presents Whorf's linguistic theories in a condensed form and that it was mainly through this report that Whorf exerted influence on the discipline of descriptive linguistics ^{[n 3]}

Final years[link]

In late 1938 Whorf's own health declined. He was operated for cancer and fell into an unproductive period. He was also deeply influenced by Sapir's death in early 1939. It was in the writings of his last two years that he laid out the research program of Linguistic relativity, particularly his 1939 memorial article for Sapir "The Relation of Habitual Thought And Behavior to Language"^[22] has been taken to be Whorf's definitive statement of the issue, and his most frequently quoted piece ^{[n 4]}.

In Whorf's last year he also published three articles for a popular in the MIT Technology Review title "Science and Linguistics", "Linguistics as an Exact Science" and "Language and Logic". He was also invited to contribute an article to a theosophical journal Theosophist published in Madras, India, Whorf wrote the article "Language, Mind and Reality". In these final pieces he offered a critique of Western science in which he suggested that non-European languages often referred to physical phenomena in ways that more directly reflected aspects of reality than many European languages, and that science ought to pay attention to the effects of linguistic categorization in its efforts to describe the physical world. Particularly he criticized the Indo-European languages for promoting a mistaken essentialist worldview, which had been disproven by advances in the sciences - whereas he suggested that other languages dedicated more attention to processes and dynamics rather than stable essences.^[10] Whorf argued that paying attention to how other physical phenomena are described in the study of linguistics could make valuable contributions to science, by pointing out the ways in which certain assumptions about reality is implicit in the structure of language itself, and how language guides the attention of their speakers towards certain phenomena in the world which risk to become overemphasized while leaving other phenomena at risk of being overlooked^[23].

Posthumous reception and legacy[link]

At Whorf's death his friend G. L. Trager was appointed as curator of his unpublished manuscripts. Some of them were published in the years after his death by Whorf's other friend Harry Hoijer. In the decade following Trager and particularly Hoijer did much to popularize Whorf's ideas about linguistic relativity, and it was Hoijer who coined the term "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis", which, even though technically a misnomer, went on to become the most widely known label for Whorf's ideas. Another early proponent of Whorf's ideas was anthropologist Dorothy Lee, who published a number of imaginative studies of Wintu culture and language.

In 1953 psychologists Eric Lenneberg and Roger Brown criticized Whorf harshly for his reliance on anecdotal evidence and they took it upon themselves to formulate the hypothesis in a way that would make it scientifically testable. They decided to focus on color terminology because that was an area where the relation between perception and vocabulary differences would be readily testable. In 1956 they published a study of Zuni color terms that provided slight support for a weak effect of semantic categorization of color terms on color perception. By doing so they sparked a line of empirical studies investigating the principle of linguistic relativity^{[n 5]}. This line of research fell into disfavor from the 1960s to 1980s as Noam Chomsky came to redefine linguistics, and much of psychology, in formal universalist terms. Several studies from that period claimed unequivocally to have refuted Whorf's hypothesis demonstrating that linguistic diversity is merely a surface veneer masking underlying universal cognitive principles^[24][25]. Many such studies were highly polemic and disparaging in their language, ridiculing Whorf's analyses and examples or his lack of an academic degree^{[n 6]}.

Detractors such as Eric Lenneberg, Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker have criticized Whorf for not being sufficiently clear in his formulation of how he meant language influences thought, and for not providing real evidence in support of his assumptions. Most of his arguments were in the form of examples that were anecdotal or speculative in nature, and functioned as attempts to show how "exotic" grammatical traits were connected to what were apparently equally exotic worlds of thought. Even Whorf's defenders acknowledge that his writing style was often convoluted and couched in neologisms - although this has also been described exactly as a result of his awareness of language use, and his reluctant to use terminology that might have pre-existing connotations.

Detractors have also frequently pointed to Whorf's "amateur" status, insinuating that he was unqualified as a linguist and could be simply dismissed. However, this does not represent how he was viewed during his life time when his work was evidently highly regarded as being of a professional standard by authorities such as Sapir and his students, Boas, Bloomfield, Tozzer, Spinden, and the Social Science and Research Council. Indeed, John A. Lucy writes "despite his 'amateur' status, Whorf's work in linguistics was and still is recognized as being of superb professional quality by linguists".^[26] Also evidencing Whorf's level of approval by his academic peers at Yale University was that he was chosen to teach Sapir's graduate seminar in Native American linguistics while Sapir was on sabbatical in 1937-38.^[27]

Today many followers of universalist schools of thought still oppose the idea of linguistic relativity. For example, Steven Pinker argues in his book The Language Instinct that thought exists prior to language and independently to it, a view also espoused by philosophers of language such as Jerry Fodor, John Locke and Plato. This would mean that language is itself inconsequential for human thought, and that human beings do not even think in "natural" language, i.e. any language that we actually communicate in; rather, we think in a meta-language, preceding any natural language, which Pinker following Fodor calls "mentalese." Pinker attacks what he calls "Whorf's radical position," declaring, "the more you examine Whorf's arguments, the less sense they make."^[28] Pinker has been criticized by scholars more sympathetic to relativism for misrepresenting Whorf's views and arguing against strawmen^{[29][30][31] [32][33][n 7]}.

Whorf's views have been compared to those of philosopher's such as Friedrich Nietzsche and the late Ludwig Wittgenstein both of whom considered language to have important bearings on thought and reasoning, to Psychologists such as Lev Vygotsky whose social constructivism considers the cognitive development of children to be mediated by the social use of language, and to literary theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin whose approach to textual meaning was also holistic and relativistic. As an alternative to the reductionist and structuralist view often prevalent in the hard sciences, Whorf has come to be widely embraced by postmodernist and relativist scholars in the social and cognitive sciences.

Linguistic relativity studies have experienced a resurgence since the 1990s, and a series of favorable experimental results have put Whorfianism back on the agenda, especially in cultural psychology and linguistic anthropology^{[34][35][36][37]}. In turn Universalist scholars frequently dismiss positive findings of, often subtle rather than spectacular, forms of influence of linguistic categories on thought or behavior as "dull"^{[38][n 8]} or "boring" ^[39], suggesting that Whorf's excitement about linguistic relativity had promised spectacular cognitive differences between speakers of different languages.

Work[link]

Linguistic Relativity[link]

Whorf is best known as the main proponent for what he called the principle of linguistic relativity, but which is often called "the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" after him and Edward Sapir. Whorf never stated the principle in the form of an hypothesis, and the idea that linguistic categories influenced perception and cognition was shared by many other scholars before him, but because Whorf in his articles gave specific examples of how he saw the grammatical categories of specific languages to relate to conceptual and behavioral patterns it pointed towards an empirical research program that has been taken up by subsequent scholars, and which is often called "Sapir-Whorf studies".

Whorf has sometimes been taken to be a proponent of a strong form of linguistic determinism, the view that linguistic categories determine what a person is able to think, for example by Steven Pinker^[40]. But a careful reading of Whorf's works shows that he never made that argument although some of his statement's do lend themselves to such interpretations if read superficially.

In one oft quoted passage Whorf writes:

"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data that the agreement decrees. We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated."^[41]

The strong statements about the obligatory nature of the terms of language have been taken to suggest that Whorf meant that language completely determined the scope of possible conceptualizations. However even in the quote it is clear that Whorf is talking about the terms in which we speak of the world, not the terms in which we think of it. Whorf noted that in order to communicate our thoughts and experiences to other members of our speech community we have no choice but to use the linguistic categories of our shared language, this requires us to mould our experiences into the shape of language in order to make them speakable, a process that has been called "thinking for speaking". This interpretation is suported by Whorf's subsequent statement that "No individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality, but is constrained by certain modes of interpretation even when he thinks himself most free". Similarly the statement that observers are led to different pictures of the universe has been understood as an argument that different conceptualizations are incommensurable making translation between different conceptual and linguistic systems impossible. This is clearly a misreading of Whorf since throughout his work one of his main points was exactly that such systems could be "calibrated" and thereby be made commensurable, but only once we have become aware of the differences in conceptual schemes through linguistic analysis.

Among Whorf's well known examples of linguistic relativity are examples of instances where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in English and other European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE "Standard Average European" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of the less-studied languages). One of Whorf's examples for this was how the Hopi language describes water with two different words for drinking water in a container versus a natural body of water. These examples of polysemy served the double purpose of showing that indigenous languages sometimes made more fine grained semantic distinctions than European languages and that direct translation between two languages, even of seemingly basic concepts like snow or water, is not always possible.

Another anecdote used by Whorf to show that language use affects behavior came from his experience in his day job as a chemical engineer working for an insurance company as a fire inspector^[42]. Whorf described a workplace in which full gasoline drums where stored in one room and empty ones in another. Whorf observed that even though the "empty" drums were in fact more dangerous than the full ones because of the flammable vapors they contained, workers would handle them with much less care than the full drums and they would smoke in the room with "empty" drums, but not in the room with full ones. Whorf argued that by habitually speaking of the vapor-filled drums as empty and by extension as inert, the workers had made them self blind to the obvious risk posed by smoking near the "empty drums".

In 1953 psychologist Eric Lenneberg published a detailed criticism of the line of Whorf's work^[43]. He criticized Whorf's examples from an objectivist view of language holding that languages are principally meant to represent events in the real world and that even though different languages express these ideas in different ways, the meanings of such expressions and therefore the thoughts of the speaker are equivalent. He argued that when Whorf was describing in English how a Hopi speaker's view of time was different, he was in fact translating the Hopi concept into English and therefore disproving the existence of linguistic relativity. He did not address the fact that Whorf was not principally concerned with translatability, but rather with how the habitual use of language influences habitual behavior. Whorf's point was that while English speakers may be able to understand how a Hopi speaker thinks, they are not necessarily able to think in that way.^[44] Lenneberg also argued that Whorf did not adequately demonstrate causality between the linguistic category and the behavior patterns, so that it is impossible to know whether for example the workers talked of the drums as empty because they treated them as inert or vice versa, and that this meant that the argument that language influences thought was largely circular. Whorf however did not intend to make any statements about direct causality between language and behavior, indeed explicitly rejecting the notion of unidirectional causality. Whorf rather argued that "Language and culture had grown up together", and that both were mutually shaped by each other and by the habitual use to which they were put in communities^[22].

Whorf, as Sapir, drew explicitly on the principle of general relativity introduced by Albert Einstein in Physics, maintaining that observations are always made through the medium of a frame of reference, which in the case of linguistic relativity means the grammatical and semantic categories of a specific language. Whorf himself considered the phonemic principle, as demonstrated by Sapir, to be the basic example of the linguistic relativity principle. Sapir, following an original observation by Boas, had shown that speakers of a language unconsciously perceived sounds that were acoustically distinct as similar when they were examples of the same underlying phoneme and therefore did not contribute to changes of semantic meaning, whereas speakers of languages in which the two sounds were different phonemes were attentive to the difference between them. A clear example of how differences frame of reference of an observer leads to different patterns of attention and perception ^[45].

Whorf was also influenced by gestalt psychology, and made the observation that languages require their speakers to describe the same events as different gestalt constructions, what Whorf called "isolates from experience". One example he gives is the differences in describing the action of cleaning a gun with a ramrod between English and Shawnee: whereas English focuses on the two types of objects involved and the instrumental relation between them and the purpose of the action (removing dirt), the Shawnee language focuses on the movement of making a physical motion of one's arm by a space inside a hole is made dry. The event describe is the same but the attention in terms of figure and ground are different^[46][33].

Contributions to Linguistic Theory[link]

Whorf invented many innovative theoretical concepts. Some of them have stood the test of time, becoming adopted into the general conceptual toolkit of linguistics and anthropology. Even the staunchest anti-Whorfian is likely to know and use for example the concept of the allophone, first introduced by Whorf.

Overt and Covert categories[link]

Whorf's distinction between "overt" (phenotypical) and "covert" (cryptotypical) grammatical categories has also become widely influential in linguistics and anthropology. British linguist Michael Halliday argues Whorf's notion of the "cryptotype" and his conception of "how grammar models reality" will "eventually turn out to be among the major contributions of twentieth century linguistics".^[47]

Allophone[link]

Whorf also introduced the concept of the allophone, a word describing positional phonetic variants of a single superordinate phoneme, in doing so he placed a cornerstone in consolidating early phoneme theory.

Metalinguistics[link]

Central to Whorf's inquiries was the approach that was later described as metalinguistics by G. L. Trager. Whorf was crucially interested in the ways in which speakers come to be aware of the language that they use, and become able to describe and analyze language using language itself to do so.^[48] For Whorf the ability to arrive at progressively more accurate descriptions of the world hinged partly on our ability to construct a metalanguage for describing the effects of language on our experience, and thus become able to calibrate different conceptual schemes. Whorf's endeavors have been taken up in the development of the study of metalinguistics and metalinguistic awareness first by Michael Silverstein and subsequently by the field of linguistic anthropology.

Studies of Uto-Aztecan languages[link]

Whorf did important work on the Uto-Aztecan languages, which had been conclusively demonstrated as a valid language family by Sapir in 1915. Working first on Nahuatl, Tepecano, Tohono O'odham he established familiarity with the langauge group even before meeting Sapir in 1928. During his time at Yale he published several articles on Uto-Aztecan linguistics, such as "Notes on the Tübatulabal language"^[49], and " The Comparative Linguistics of Uto-Aztecan"^[50]. His work served to further cement the foundations of the comparative Uto-Aztecan studies. He also published the first detailed descriptive work on the Nahuatl and Hopi languages.

Nahuatl linguistics[link]

The first Native American language studied by Whorf was Nahuatl which he studied firt from colonial grammars and documents, but which was also the subject of his first field work experience in 1930. Based on his studies ofClassical Nahuatl Whorf argued that Nahuatl was an oligosynthetic language, a typological category that he invented. In Mexico he studied the dialects of Milpa Alta and Tepoztlán with native speakers. He never published his grammar sketch of the Milpa Alta dialect of Nahuatl but it was published post-humously by Harry Hoijer^[51] and became quite influential and used as the basic description of "Modern Nahuatl" by many subsequent scholars. The description was quite condensed and in some places difficult to understand because of Whorf's propensity for inventing his own terminology for grammatical concepts, but it has generally been considered a technically advanced work. He also produced an analysis of the prosody of these dialects which he related to the history of the glottal stop and vowel length in Nahuan languages. This work was prepared for publication by Lyle Campbell and Frances Karttunen in 1993, who also considered it a valuable description of the two endangered dialects, and the only of its kind to include detailed phonetic analysis of supra-segmental phenomena.^[18]

Whorf's law[link]

In a 1937 paper publish in the journal American Anthropologist, Whorf argued that the Nahuan or Aztecan languages] are characterized by having undergone a sound change changing the original /*t/ to [tɬ] before */a/.^[52] This sound law has come to be known as "Whorf's law", and is still considered valid although a more detailed understanding of the precise conditions under which it took place has been developed. ^{[53] [54][55]}

Azteco-Tanoan[link]

Also in 1937, Whorf and his friend G. L. Trager, published a paper elaborating on a Azteco-Tanoan^{[n 9]} language family originally proposed by Sapir as a family comprising the Uto-Aztecan and the Kiowa-Tanoan languages (the Tewa and Kiowa languages)^[56]. WHorf 7 Trager proposed 67 cognate sets in support of the family. This proposed classification has not been definitively demonstrated, largely because of slow progress in the reconstruction of the intermediate stages of the two language families involved^[57], but is still considered promising by many linguists.^[58][59] Reviewing the proposal, historical linguist Lyle Campbell rejects most of Whorf and Trager's proposed cognates as inconclusive, but maintains that the proposal is not implausible, but that it would require a much more detailed study to determine its validity, particularly additional support from grammatical and morphological evidence. A recent article by Jane H. Hill argues that the evidence cited for the genetic relation by Whorf and Trager is better understood as a result of Language contact between the Uto-Aztecan and Kiowa-Tanoan proto-languages ^[60].

Work on Hopi[link]

In his lifetime Whorf came to be known as the main expert on the Hopi language. He didn't publish a full description, but did publish articles on specific aspects of Hopi grammar and culture. His description of the Toreva dialect of Hopi (second mesa) based on his work with Ernest Naquayouma was published post-humously by Harry Hoijer ^[61] Among the articles published in his life time was an article on Hopi architecture in which Whorf compared grammatical principles to the principles used by the Hopi to build their houses^[62], a paper on the ways in which the Hopi grammar encodes the description of repetitive and vibrating phenomena^[63], and an article about the grammatic codification of modality and evidentiality in Hopi^[64]

Hopi Time[link]

Of Whorf's work on Hopi the most widely known has been his description of the way in which he saw a relation between the way in which the Hopi conceptualized time and grammar and the way they spoke about temporal relations .Whorf's most elaborate argument for the existence of linguistic relativity regarded what he believed to be a fundamental difference in the understanding of time as a conceptual category among the Hopi.^[22] He argued that in contrast to English and other SAE languages, the Hopi language does not treat the flow of time as a sequence of distinct, countable instances, like "three days" or "five years" but rather as a single process and consequentially it does not have nouns referring to units of time. He proposed that this view of time was fundamental in all aspects of Hopi culture and explained certain Hopi behavioral patterns. In his 1939 memorial essay to Sapir he wrote that “… the Hopi language is seen to contain no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call “time”, or to past, present, or future…”^[22] Whorf's analyses of temporal expressions and concepts in Hopi was challenged by linguist Ekkehart Malotki who provided countless examples of the ways in which the Hopi language does in fact refer to time^[25]. Other scholars however have defended Whorf, noting that Whorf clearly did not suggest that Hopi had no concept of time or no words or categories with which to describe temporality, but that the Hopi concept of time is different from that of speakers of English^[20][65] In his descriptive work Whorf described the Hopi categories of tense, but noted that they didn't divide time into past, present and future as speakers of most European languages tend to do, but rather have one tense that refers to both present and past, and another to refer to events that have not yet happened at the time of speaking but which may or may not happen in the future. He also described a large array of expressions that he called "tensors" and which referred to time in ways that were different from the English way of dividing time into countable units, describable in the same terms as physical objects.

Maya Epigraphy[link]

In a series of published and unpublished studies in the 1930s, he argued that Mayan writing was phonetic to some degree. While Whorf's work on deciphering the Maya script gained some support from Alfred Tozzer at Harvard, it was vehemently rejected by the main authority on Ancient Maya culture, J.E.S. Thompson, who maintained that there was no phonetic component of Maya writing and that decipherment based on linguistic analysis of Modern Maya languages was therefore impossible^[66]. Whorf argued that it was exactly the reluctance to apply linguistic analysis of Maya languages that had held the decipherment back. Although many details of Whorf's work on Maya are now known to have been incorrect, his central claim was vindicated by Yuri Knorozov's syllabic decipherment of Mayan writing in the 1950s.

Critique of Science[link]

A theme uniting Whorf's differen't lines of work was a the simultaneous realization that principles of science are the most powerful way to achieve knowledge coupled with a deep uneasiness with positivist and reductionist explanations of physical and psychological phenomena. With insights that have been described as pre-saging the later linguistic turn in the social sciences and the postpositivist turn in the physical sciences Whorf argued that the scientist should be more aware the role that his own enculturation and language played in his coloring scientific observations and conclusions.^{[23][n 10]}

Notes[link]

Notes

Citations

References[link]

External links[link]

• About Whorf.
• B. L. Whorf, "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language"PDF.
• Guide to the B.L. Whorf Papers at Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives
• What Whorf Really Said - Evaluation of Pinker's (1994) critique of Whorf, by Nick Yee

Benjamin Lee may refer to:

• Benjamin Lee (footballer) (born 1989), Danish footballer
• Benjamin Lee (politician), managing director of the City and County of Honolulu
• Benjamin W. Lee (1935–1977), Korean-American physicist
• Benjamin Lee (academic), professor of anthropology and philosophy at the New School
• Ben Lee (born 1978), Australian musician and actor
• Benny Lee (1916–1995), British comedy actor and singer

See also[link]

• Benjamin W. Leigh (1781–1849), American lawyer and politician
• Benjamin Lees (1924–2010), composer

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