Benjamin Whorf
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Benjamin Lee Whorf (April 24, 1897 – July 26, 1941) was an American linguist.
Born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, the son of Harry and Sarah (Lee) Whorf, Benjamin Lee Whorf graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1918 with a degree in chemical engineering and shortly afterwards began work as a fire prevention engineer (inspector) for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, pursuing linguistic and anthropological studies as an avocation.
In 1931 he began studying linguistics at Yale University under the famed Edward Sapir. Sapir was impressed enough with Whorf to further support his academic interests and, in 1936, Whorf was appointed Honorary Research Fellow in Anthropology at Yale. In 1937 the university awarded him the Sterling Fellowship. He was a Lecturer in Anthropology from 1937 through 1938, when he began having serious health problems.
Although he never took up linguistics as a profession (he used to say that having an independent, non-academic source of income allowed him to better and more freely pursue his specific academic interests), his contributions to the field were, nevertheless, profound, and show repercussions to this day.
Whorf's primary area of interest in linguistics was the study of native American languages, particularly those of Mesoamerica. He became quite well known for his work on the Hopi language, and for a theory he called the principle of linguistic relativity. Developed in conjunction with Sapir (who had already published a version of it in 1929) it became more widely known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He was considered to be a captivating speaker and did much to popularize his linguistic ideas through popular lectures and articles written to be accessible to lay readers, as well as publishing numerous technical articles.
Some of Whorf's early work on linguistics and particularly on linguistic relativity was inspired by the reports he wrote on insurance losses, where misunderstanding had been a cause. In one famous example, an employee who was not a native speaker of English had placed drums of liquid near a heater, believing that as a 'flammable' liquid would burn then a 'highly inflammable' one would not. His papers and lectures featured examples from both his insurance work and his fieldwork with Hopi and other American languages.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis primarily dealt with the way that language affects thought. Also sometimes called the Whorfian hypothesis (much to Whorf's disapproval) this theory claims that the language a person speaks (independent of the culture in which he or she resides) affects the way that he or she thinks, meaning that the structure of the language itself affects cognition.
Less well known, but important, are his contributions to the study of the Nahuatl and Maya languages. He claimed that Nahuatl was an oligosynthetic language (a claim that would be brought up again some twenty years later by Morris Swadesh, another controversial American linguist, and, more recently, by the Mexican linguist Ernst Herrera Legorreta). Regarding Maya, he focused on the linguistic nature of the Mayan writing, claiming that it was syllabic to some degree (a claim that has been proven right by Linda Scheele et al. over the past decade.
Benjamin Lee Whorf died of cancer at the relatively young age of 44, and much of his most significant work was published posthumously.
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___. "History and Creative Work: From the Most Ordinary to the Most Exalted." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 19(1983): 4-15.
___ and S.N. Davis. "Inching Our Way Up Mount Olympus: The Evolving Systems Approach to Creative Thinking." In The Nature of Creativity. Ed. R.J. Sternberg. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988: 243-69.
___. "On the Hypothesized Relation Between Giftedness and Creativity." New Directions for Child Development 17(1982): 7-30.
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___. "Which Way is Up? A Developmental Question." In Adult Cognitive Development. Ed. R.A. Mines and K.S. Kitchener. New York: Praeger: 112-33.
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___. "Semiotic Origins of Mind-Body Dualism." Semiotics, Self, and Society. Ed. Benjamin Lee and Greg Urban. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989. 193-228.
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___. "The Systematization of the Whorf Hypothesis." Anthropological Linguistics 1(1959): 31-35.
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Whorf, Benjamin. "An American Indian Model of the Universe." International Journal of American Linguistics 16(1950): 67-72; rpt. ETC, A Review of General Semantics 8 (1950): 27-33.(1936). In Language, Thought, and Reality: 57-64.
___. "Blazing Icicles." Hartford Agent, 1940.
___. "A Brotherhood of Thought." Main Currents in Modern Thought 1.4 (1941): 13-14.
___. "A Central Mexican Inscription Combining Mexican and Maya Day Signs." American Anthropologist 34(1932): 296-302; in Language, Thought, and Reality: 43-50.
___. Collected Papers on Metalinguistics. Washington, DC: Department of State, Foreign Service Institute, 1952.
___. "The Comparative Linguistics of Uto-Aztecan." American Anthropologist 37(1935): 600-608.
___. "Concerning Science and Religion." Benjamin Lee Whorf Papers. Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library.
___. "Decipherment of the Linguistic Portion of the Maya Hiero glyphs" (1940). In Language, Thought, and Reality: 173-198.
___. "Discussion of Hopi Linguistics" (1937). In Language, Thought, and Reality: 102-111.
___. "Dr. Reiser's Humanism." Main Currents in Modern Thought 1.5 (1941): 12- 14.
___. "The Expansion Theory." Benjamin Lee Whorf Papers. Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library.
___. "The Flux-Outlet Theory." Benjamin Lee Whorf Papers. Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library.
___. "Gestalt Technique of Stem Composition in Shawnee" (1939). In Language, Thought, and Reality: 160-72.
___. "Grammatical Categories." Language 21(1945): 1-11; In Language, Thought, and Reality: 87-101.
___. "H.G. Wells." Main Currents in Modern Thought 1.3 (1941): 6.
___. "The Hopi Language, Toreva Dialect." Linguistic Structures of Native America. Ed. Harry Hoijer. New York: Viking Fund, 1946: 159-83.
___. "The Hurrians of Old Chaldea." Main Currents in Modern Thought 1.3 (1941): 15.
___. "In Defense of Puritanism." Benjamin Lee Whorf Papers. Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library.
___. "Interpretation of Isotopes." Main Currents in Modern Thought 1.3 (1941): 12-13.
___. "Language, Mind, and Reality." The Theosophist 63(1942): 281-91; rpt. ETC, A Review of General Semantics 9(1952): 167-88; In Language, Thought, and Reality: 246-270.
___. "Language: Plan and Conception of an Arrangement" (1938). In Language, Thought, and Reality: 125-134.
___. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Edited by John B. Carroll. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1956.
___. "Languages and Logic." Technology Review 43(1941): 250-52, 266, 268, 272; In Language, Thought, and Reality: 233-45.
___. "Light-Velocity and Expansion." Benjamin Lee Whorf Papers. Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library.
___. "A Linguistic Consideration of Thinking in Primitive Communities" (1936). In Language, Thought, and Reality: 65-86.
___. "Linguistic Factors in the Terminology of Hopi Architecture." International Journal of American Linguistics 19(1953): 141-45; In Language, Thought, and Reality: 199-206.
___. "Linguistics as an Exact Science." Technology Review 43(1940): 61-63, 80-83; In Language, Thought, and Reality: 220-232.
___. "Loan Words in Ancient Mexico." Philological and Documentary Studies 1(1943): 1-17; rpt. Studies in Linguistics 5(1947): 49-64.
___. "The Maya Manuscript in Dresden." Art and Archaeology 34(1933): 270.
___. "Maya Writing and Its Decipherment." Maya Research 2(1935): 367-82.
___. "Notes on the Tubatulabal Language." American Anthropologist 38(1936): 341-44.
___. "On Being." Benjamin Lee Whorf Papers. Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library.
___. "On the Connection of Ideas" (1927). In Language, Thought, and Reality: 35-39.
___. "On Psychology" (n.d.). In Language, Thought, and Reality: 40-42.
___. "The Origin of Aztec TL." American Anthropologist 39(1937): 265-74.
___. "Phonemic Analysis of the English of Eastern Massachusetts." Studies in Linguistics 2(1943): 21-40.
___. The Phonetic Value of Certain Characters in Maya Writing. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Vo. XIII, No. 8 Cambridge: Peabody Museum and Harvard University, 1933.
___. "Pines." Benjamin Lee Whorf Papers. Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library.
___. "The Punctual and Segmentative Aspects of Verbs in Hopi." Langugage 12(1936): 127-31; In Language, Thought, and Reality: 51-56.
___. "Purpose vs. Evolution." New Republic, 19 Dec. 1925.
___. "The Reign of Huemac." American Anthropologist 31(1929): 667-84.
___. "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior in Language." Language, Culture, and Personality. Ed. Leslie Spier. Menasha, WI: Sapir Memorial Publication Fund, 1941: 75-93; In Language, Thought, and Reality: 134-159.
___, with George L. Trager. "The Relationship of Uto-Aztecan and Tanoan." American Anthropologist 39(1937): 609-24.
___. Review of Living Light by E.N. Harvey. Main Currents in Modern Thought 1.1 (1940): 3-5.
___. Review of The Way of Things by W.P. Montague." Main Currents in Modern Thought 1.4 (1941): 10-11.
___. "Science and Linguistics." Technology Review 42(1940): 229-31, 247-48; In Language, Thought, and Reality: 207-219.
___. "Some Verbal Categories of Hopi." Language 14(1938): 275-86; In Language, Thought, and Reality: 112-24.
___. "Toward a Higher Mental World." Main Currents in Modern Thought 1.7 (1941): 14-15.
___. "Unanswered Questions from Ancient Times." Benjamin Lee Whorf Papers. Yale University, Sterling Memorial `Library.
___. "Universal Trinity in Unity." Benjamin Lee Whorf Papers. Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library.
___. "We May End the War That is Within All Wars That are Waged to End All Wars." Main Currents in Modern Thought 1.1 (1940): 9-10.
___. "Why I Have Discarded Evolution." Benjamin Lee Whorf Papers. Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library.
External link
- About Whorf (http://mtsu32.mtsu.edu:11072/Whorf/mindblw.htm)da:Benjamin Lee Whorf