Benjamin Lee Whorf (; April 24, 1897 – July 26, 1941) was an American
linguist
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
and
fire prevention
Fire prevention is a function of many fire departments. The goal of fire prevention is to educate the public on the precautions which should be taken to prevent potentially harmful fires and how to survive these fires in the event that they do o ...
engineer. He is known for "
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis , the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people' ...
," the idea that differences between the structures of different languages shape how their speakers perceive and conceptualize the world. This principle has been named after him and his mentor
Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American Jewish anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States.
Sap ...
, which was initially called
linguistic relativity by Whorf because he saw the idea as having implications similar to
Einstein’s principle of
physical relativity.
The idea, however, follows from post-
Hegelian
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (; ; 27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher. He is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. His influence extends a ...
19th-century
philosophy, especially from
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt (, also , ; ; 22 June 1767 – 8 April 1835) was a Prussian philosopher, linguist, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin, which was named afte ...
;
and from
Wilhelm Wundt's
Völkerpsychologie Völkerpsychologie is a method of psychology that was founded in the nineteenth century by the famous psychologist, Wilhelm Wundt. However, the term was first coined by post-Hegelian social philosophers Heymann Steinthal and Moritz Lazarus.
Wundt ...
.
Throughout his life Whorf was a
chemical engineer by profession, but as a young man he took an interest in linguistics. At first this interest drew him to the study of
Biblical Hebrew, but he quickly went on to study the indigenous languages of
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area in southern North America and most of Central America. It extends from approximately central Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica ...
on his own. Professional scholars were impressed by his work and in 1930 he received a grant to study the
Nahuatl language in
Mexico
Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...
; on his return home he presented several influential papers on the language at linguistics conferences.
This led him to begin studying linguistics with Edward Sapir at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
while still maintaining his day job at the
Hartford Fire Insurance Company. During his time at Yale he worked on the description of the
Hopi language (including his now-infamous claims about its
lack of conception of time), and the
historical linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
# to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
# ...
of the
Uto-Aztecan languages, publishing many influential papers in professional journals. He was chosen as the substitute for Sapir during his medical leave in 1938. Whorf taught his seminar on "Problems of American Indian Linguistics". In addition to his well-known work on linguistic relativity, he wrote a grammar sketch of Hopi and studies of
Nahuatl dialects, proposed a deciphering of
Maya hieroglyphic writing, and published the first attempt towards a reconstruction of Uto-Aztecan.
After his death from cancer in 1941 his manuscripts were curated by his linguist friends who also worked to spread the influence of Whorf's ideas on the relation between language, culture and cognition. Many of his works were published posthumously in the first decades after his death. In the 1960s Whorf's views fell out of favor and he became the subject of harsh criticisms by scholars who considered language structure to primarily reflect cognitive universals rather than cultural differences. Critics argued that Whorf's ideas were untestable and poorly formulated and that they were based on badly analyzed or misunderstood data.
In the late 20th century, interest in Whorf's ideas experienced a resurgence, and a new generation of scholars began reading Whorf's works, arguing that previous critiques had only engaged superficially with Whorf's actual ideas, or had attributed to him ideas he had never expressed. The field of linguistic relativity studies remains an active focus of research in
psycholinguistics and
linguistic anthropology
Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass mo ...
, and continues to generate debate and controversy between proponents of relativism and proponents of universalism. By comparison, Whorf's other work in linguistics, the development of such concepts as the
allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...
and the
cryptotype, and the formulation of "
Whorf's law" in Uto-Aztecan historical linguistics, have met with broad acceptance.
Biography
Early life
The son of Harry Church Whorf and Sarah Edna Lee Whorf, Benjamin Lee Whorf was born on April 24, 1897 in
Winthrop, Massachusetts
Winthrop is a town in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 19,316 at the 2020 census. Winthrop is an ocean-side suburban community in Greater Boston situated at the north entrance to Boston Harbor, close to Logan Int ...
. Harry Church Whorf was an artist, intellectual, and designer – first working as a commercial artist and later as a dramatist. Whorf had two younger brothers, John and
Richard
Richard is a male given name. It originates, via Old French, from Old Frankish and is a compound of the words descending from Proto-Germanic ''*rīk-'' 'ruler, leader, king' and ''*hardu-'' 'strong, brave, hardy', and it therefore means 'stro ...
, who both went on to become notable artists. John became an internationally renowned painter and illustrator; Richard was an actor in films such as ''
Yankee Doodle Dandy
''Yankee Doodle Dandy'' is a 1942 American biographical musical film about George M. Cohan, known as "The Man Who Owned Broadway". It stars James Cagney, Joan Leslie, Walter Huston, and Richard Whorf, and features Irene Manning, George To ...
'' and later an
Emmy-nominated television director of such shows as ''
The Beverly Hillbillies
''The Beverly Hillbillies'' is an American television sitcom that was broadcast on CBS from 1962 to 1971. It had an ensemble cast featuring Buddy Ebsen, Irene Ryan, Donna Douglas, and Max Baer Jr. as the Clampetts, a poor, backwoods family f ...
''. Whorf was the intellectual of the three and at a young age he conducted chemical experiments with his father's photographic equipment. He was also an avid reader, interested in botany, astrology, and Middle American prehistory. He read
William H. Prescott
William Hickling Prescott (May 4, 1796 – January 28, 1859) was an American historian and Hispanist, who is widely recognized by historiographers to have been the first American scientific historian. Despite having serious visual impairm ...
's ''
Conquest of Mexico
The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, also known as the Conquest of Mexico or the Spanish-Aztec War (1519–21), was one of the primary events in the Spanish colonization of the Americas. There are multiple 16th-century narratives of the eve ...
'' several times. At the age of 17 he began to keep a copious diary in which he recorded his thoughts and dreams.
Career in fire prevention
Whorf graduated from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
in 1918 with a degree in
chemical engineering
Chemical engineering is an engineering field which deals with the study of operation and design of chemical plants as well as methods of improving production. Chemical engineers develop economical commercial processes to convert raw materials int ...
where his academic performance was of average quality. In 1920 he married Celia Inez Peckham, who became the mother of his three children, Raymond Ben, Robert Peckham and Celia Lee.
Around the same time he began work as a fire prevention engineer (an inspector) for the
Hartford Fire Insurance Company. He was particularly good at the job and was highly commended by his employers. His job required him to travel to production facilities throughout New England to be inspected. One anecdote describes him arriving at a chemical plant in which he was denied access by the director because he would not allow anyone to see the production procedure which was a trade secret. Having been told what the plant produced, Whorf wrote a chemical formula on a piece of paper, saying to 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."
Whorf helped to attract new customers to the Fire Insurance Company; they favored his thorough inspections and recommendations. Another famous anecdote from his job was used by Whorf to argue that language use affects habitual behavior.
Whorf described a workplace in which full gasoline drums were stored in one room and empty ones in another; he said that because of flammable vapor the "empty" drums were more dangerous than those that were full, although workers handled them less carefully to the point that they smoked 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 were oblivious to the risk posed by smoking near the "empty drums".
Early interest in religion and language
Whorf was a spiritual man throughout his lifetime although what religion he followed has been the subject of debate. As a young man he produced a manuscript titled "Why I have discarded
evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...
", causing some scholars to describe him as a devout
Methodist
Methodism, also called the Methodist movement, is a group of historically related denominations of Protestant Christianity whose origins, doctrine and practice derive from the life and teachings of John Wesley. George Whitefield and John's ...
, who was impressed with
fundamentalism
Fundamentalism is a tendency among certain groups and individuals that is characterized by the application of a strict literal interpretation to scriptures, dogmas, or ideologies, along with a strong belief in the importance of distinguish ...
, and perhaps supportive of
creationism. However, throughout his life Whorf's main religious interest was
theosophy
Theosophy is a religion established in the United States during the late 19th century. It was founded primarily by the Russian Helena Blavatsky and draws its teachings predominantly from Blavatsky's writings. Categorized by scholars of religion ...
, a nonsectarian organization based on
Buddhist
Buddhism ( , ), also known as Buddha Dharma and Dharmavinaya (), is an Indian religion or philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha. It originated in northern India as a -movement in the 5th century BCE, and ...
and
Hindu
Hindus (; ) are people who religiously adhere to Hinduism. Jeffery D. Long (2007), A Vision for Hinduism, IB Tauris, , pages 35–37 Historically, the term has also been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for ...
teachings that 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". Some scholars have argued that the conflict between spiritual and scientific inclinations has been a driving force in Whorf's intellectual development, particularly in the attraction by ideas of linguistic relativity. Whorf 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."
Around 1924 Whorf first became interested in
linguistics
Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...
. Originally he analyzed Biblical texts, seeking to uncover hidden layers of meaning. Inspired by the
esoteric
Western esotericism, also known as esotericism, esoterism, and sometimes the Western mystery tradition, is a term scholars use to categorise a wide range of loosely related ideas and movements that developed within Western society. These ideas ...
work ''La langue hebraïque restituée'' by
Antoine Fabre d'Olivet
Antoine Fabre d'Olivet (8 December 1767, Ganges, Hérault – 25 March 1825, Paris) was a French author, poet and composer whose Biblical and philosophical hermeneutics influenced many occultists, such as Eliphas Lévi, Gérard Encausse ("Papus") ...
, he began a semantic and grammatical analysis of
Biblical Hebrew. Whorf's early manuscripts on Hebrew and Maya have been described as exhibiting a considerable degree of
mysticism
Mysticism is popularly known as becoming one with God or the Absolute, but may refer to any kind of ecstasy or altered state of consciousness which is given a religious or spiritual meaning. It may also refer to the attainment of insight in ...
, as he sought to uncover esoteric meanings of glyphs and letters.
Early studies in Mesoamerican linguistics
Whorf studied Biblical linguistics mainly at the Watkinson Library (now
Hartford Public Library
The Hartford Public Library serves the city of Hartford, Connecticut, United States. The library's main branch is located at 500 Main Street in downtown Hartford. The nine branch locations are named Albany, Barbour, Blue Hills, Camp Field, Dw ...
). This library had an extensive collection of materials about
Native American linguistics and
folklore
Folklore is shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. This includes oral traditions such as tales, legends, proverbs and jokes. They include material culture, ranging ...
, originally collected by
James Hammond Trumbull
James Hammond Trumbull (December 20, 1821 – August 5, 1897) was an American historian, philologist, bibliographer, and politician. A scholar of American Indian languages, he served as the first Connecticut State Librarian in 1854 and as Secr ...
.
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
Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and Social philosophy, social philosopher. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his ret ...
, and who in 1956 edited and published a selection of Whorf's essays as ''Language, Thought and Reality'' . The collection rekindled Whorf's interest in
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area in southern North America and most of Central America. It extends from approximately central Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica ...
n antiquity. 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 a scholarly dialog with Mesoamericanists such as
Alfred Tozzer
Alfred Marston Tozzer (July 4, 1877 – October 5, 1954) was an American anthropologist, archaeologist, linguist, and educator. His principal area of interest was Mesoamerican, especially Maya, studies. He was the husband of Margaret Castle Toz ...
, the Maya archaeologist at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
, and
Herbert Spinden
Herbert Joseph Spinden (1879–1967) was an American anthropologist, archeologist and art historian who specialized in the study of Native American cultures of the US and Mesoamerica.
Biography
Spinden was born in 1879 in Huron, a small settleme ...
of the
Brooklyn Museum.
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
Peabody Museum at Harvard. He also began to study the comparative linguistics of the
Uto-Aztecan language family
Uto-Aztecan, Uto-Aztekan or (rarely in English) Uto-Nahuatl is a family of indigenous languages of the Americas, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The na ...
, which
Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American Jewish anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States.
Sap ...
had recently demonstrated to be a linguistic family. In addition to Nahuatl, Whorf studied the
Piman
Piman (or Tepiman) refers to a group of languages within the Uto-Aztecan family that are spoken by ethnic groups (including the Pima) spanning from Arizona in the north to Durango, Mexico in the south.
The Piman languages are as follows (Campb ...
and
Tepecano language
The Tepecano language is an extinct indigenous language of Mexico belonging to the Uto-Aztecan language-family. It was formerly spoken by a small group of people in Azqueltán (earlier Atzqueltlán), Jalisco, a small village on the Río Bol ...
s, while in close correspondence with linguist
J. Alden Mason.
Field studies in Mexico
Because of the promise shown by his work on Uto-Aztecan, Tozzer and Spinden advised Whorf to apply for a grant with the
Social Science Research Council
The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is a US-based, independent, international nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing research in the social sciences and related disciplines. Established in Manhattan in 1923, it today maintains a he ...
(SSRC) to support his research. Whorf considered using the money to travel to Mexico to procure Aztec manuscripts for the Watkinson library, but Tozzer suggested he spend the time in Mexico documenting modern
Nahuatl dialects
The Nahuan or Aztecan languages are those languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family that have undergone a sound change, known as Whorf's law, that changed an original *t to before *a. Subsequently, some Nahuan languages have changed this to ...
.
In his application Whorf proposed to establish the
oligosynthetic
A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the combin ...
nature of the Nahuatl language. Before leaving Whorf presented the paper "Stem series in Maya" at the
Linguistic Society of America
The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...
conference, in which he argued that in the
Mayan languages
The Mayan languagesIn linguistics, it is conventional to use ''Mayan'' when referring to the languages, or an aspect of a language. In other academic fields, ''Maya'' is the preferred usage, serving as both a singular and plural noun, and as ...
syllables carry symbolic content. The SSRC awarded Whorf the grant and in 1930 he traveled to
Mexico City
Mexico City ( es, link=no, Ciudad de México, ; abbr.: CDMX; Nahuatl: ''Altepetl Mexico'') is the capital city, capital and primate city, largest city of Mexico, and the List of North American cities by population, most populous city in North Amer ...
, where Professor
Robert H. Barlow put him in contact with several speakers of Nahuatl to serve as his informants. The outcome of the trip to Mexico was Whorf's sketch of
Milpa Alta
Milpa Alta is a borough (''demarcación territorial'') in Mexico City. It lies in the southeast corner of the nation's capital, bordering the State of Mexico and Morelos. It is the least populated, second largest and most rural of all the boroughs ...
Nahuatl, 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 and meaning between Aztec and Maya day signs.
At Yale
![Edward Sapir](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Edward_Sapir.jpg)
Although Whorf had been entirely an
autodidact in linguistic theory and field methodology up to this point, he had already made a name for himself in Mesoamerican linguistics. Whorf had met Sapir, the leading US linguist of the day, at professional conferences, and in 1931 Sapir came to
Yale
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...
from the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
to take a position as Professor of
Anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...
. 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"; however, it was not until 1993 that it was prepared for publication by
Lyle Campbell
Lyle Richard Campbell (born October 22, 1942) is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in general. Campbell is professor emeri ...
and
Frances Karttunen
Frances Esther Karttunen (born 1942), also known as Frances Ruley Karttunen, is an American academic linguist, historian and author.
Education and career
She received her BA in 1964 from Harvard and her PhD in 1970 from Indiana University.
In ...
.
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 included such luminaries as
Morris Swadesh,
Mary Haas
Mary Rosamond Haas (January 23, 1910 – May 17, 1996) was an American linguist who specialized in North American Indian languages, Thai, and historical linguistics. She served as president of the Linguistic Society of America. She was elected ...
,
Harry Hoijer
Harry Hoijer (September 6, 1904 – March 11, 1976) was a linguist and anthropologist who worked on primarily Athabaskan languages and culture. He additionally documented the Tonkawa language, which is now extinct. Hoijer's few works make up the ...
,
G. L. Trager and
Charles F. Voegelin
Charles Frederick "Carl" Voegelin (January 14, 1906 – May 22, 1986), often cited as C. F. Voegelin, was an American linguist and anthropologist. He was one of the leading authorities on Indigenous languages of North America, specifically the Al ...
. Whorf took on a central role among Sapir's students and was well respected.
Sapir had a profound influence on Whorf's thinking. Sapir's earliest writings had espoused views of the relation between thought and language stemming from the
Humboldtian tradition he acquired through
Franz Boas, which regarded language as the historical embodiment of ''volksgeist'', or ethnic world view. But Sapir had since become influenced by a current of
logical positivism, such as that of
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, ...
and the early
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is con ...
, particularly through
Ogden and
Richards' ''
The Meaning of Meaning
''The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism'' (1923) is a book by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. It is accompanied by two supplementary essays by Bronisław Malinowski and F. ...
'', from which he adopted the view that natural language potentially obscures, rather than facilitates, the mind to perceive and describe the world as it really is. In this view, proper perception could only be accomplished through
formal logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premis ...
s. 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.
As Whorf became more influenced by positivist science he also distanced himself from some approaches to language and meaning that he saw as lacking in rigor and insight. One of these was Polish philosopher
Alfred Korzybski
Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski (, ; July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, the field of s ...
's
General semantics
General semantics is concerned with how events translate to perceptions, how they are further modified by the names and labels we apply to them, and how we might gain a measure of control over our own cognitive, emotional, and behavioral respons ...
, which was espoused in the US by
Stuart Chase. Chase admired Whorf's work and frequently sought out a reluctant Whorf, who considered Chase to be "utterly incompetent by training and background to handle such a subject." Ironically, Chase would later write the foreword for Carroll's collection of Whorf's writings.
Work on Hopi and descriptive linguistics
Sapir also encouraged Whorf to continue his work on the
historical and
descriptive linguistics
In the study of language, description or descriptive linguistics is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used (or how it was used in the past) by a speech community. François & Ponsonnet (2013).
All acad ...
of Uto-Aztecan. 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
Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...
, New York. Whorf credited Naquayouma as the source of most of his information on the Hopi language, although in 1938 he took a short field trip to the village of Mishongnovi, on the
Second Mesa
Second Mesa is a census-designated place (CDP) in Navajo County, Arizona, on the Hopi Reservation, atop the 5,700-foot (1,740 m) mesa. As of the 2010 census, the CDP population was 962, spread among three Hopi Indian villages, Musungnuvi (or ...
of the
Hopi Reservation in
Arizona
Arizona ( ; nv, Hoozdo Hahoodzo ; ood, Alĭ ṣonak ) is a state in the Southwestern United States. It is the 6th largest and the 14th most populous of the 50 states. Its capital and largest city is Phoenix. Arizona is part of the Fou ...
.
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
Linguistic Society of America
The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...
). In 1937, Yale awarded him the Sterling Fellowship. He was a lecturer in Anthropology from 1937 through 1938, replacing Sapir, who was gravely ill. Whorf gave graduate level lectures on "Problems of American Indian Linguistics". In 1938 with Trager's assistance he elaborated a report on the progress of linguistic research at the department of anthropology at Yale. The report includes some of Whorf's influential contributions to linguistic theory, such as the concept of the
allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...
and of
covert grammatical categories. has argued, that in this report Whorf's linguistic theories exist in a condensed form, and that it was mainly through this report that Whorf exerted influence on the discipline of descriptive linguistics.
[The report is reprinted in ]
Final years
In late 1938, Whorf's own health declined. After an operation for cancer he 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. His 1939 memorial article for Sapir, "The Relation of Habitual Thought And Behavior to Language",
[''The Relation of Habitual Thought And Behavior to Language''. Written in 1939 and originally published in "Language, Culture and Personality: Essays in Memory of Edward Sapir" edited by ]Leslie Spier
Leslie Spier (December 13, 1893 – December 3, 1961) was an American anthropologist best known for his ethnographic studies of American Indians. He spent a great deal of his professional life as a teacher; he retired in 1955 and died in 1961.Rob ...
, 1941, reprinted in . The piece is the source of most of the quotes used by Whorf's detractors. in particular has been taken to be Whorf's definitive statement of the issue, and is his most frequently quoted piece.
In his last year Whorf also published three articles in the ''
MIT Technology Review
''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...
'' titled "Science and Linguistics",
["Science and linguistics" first published in 1940 in ]MIT Technology Review
''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...
(42:229–31); reprinted in "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
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
, for which he wrote "Language, Mind and Reality".
[''Language Mind and reality''. Written in 1941 originally printed by the Theosophical Society in 1942 "The Theosophist" Madras, India. Vol 63:1. 281–91. Reprinted in . In 1952 also reprinted in "Etc., a Review of General Semantics, 9:167–188.] 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. He particularly criticized the
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...
for promoting a mistaken
essentialist
Essentialism is the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity. In early Western thought, Plato's idealism held that all things have such an "essence"—an "idea" or "form". In ''Categories'', Aristotle si ...
world view, which had been disproved by advances in the sciences, whereas he suggested that other languages dedicated more attention to processes and dynamics rather than stable essences.
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 are implicit in the structure of language itself, and how language guides the attention of speakers towards certain phenomena in the world which risk becoming overemphasized while leaving other phenomena at risk of being overlooked.
Posthumous reception and legacy
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 another of Whorf's friends,
Harry Hoijer
Harry Hoijer (September 6, 1904 – March 11, 1976) was a linguist and anthropologist who worked on primarily Athabaskan languages and culture. He additionally documented the Tonkawa language, which is now extinct. Hoijer's few works make up the ...
. 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" at a 1954 conference.
Trager then published an article titled "The systematization of the Whorf hypothesis", which contributed to the idea that Whorf had proposed a hypothesis that should be the basis for a program of empirical research. Hoijer also published studies of Indigenous languages and cultures of the American South West in which Whorf found correspondences between cultural patterns and linguistic ones. The term, even though technically a misnomer, went on to become the most widely known label for Whorf's ideas. According to
John A. Lucy "Whorf's work in linguistics was and still is recognized as being of superb professional quality by linguists".
Universalism and anti-Whorfianism
Whorf's work began to fall out of favor less than a decade after his death, and he was subjected to severe criticism from scholars of language, culture and psychology. In 1953 and 1954 psychologists
Roger Brown and
Eric Lenneberg
Eric Heinz Lenneberg (19 September 1921 – 31 May 1975) was a linguist and neurologist who pioneered ideas on language acquisition and cognitive psychology, particularly in terms of the concept of innateness.
Life and career
He was born in D ...
criticized Whorf for his reliance on anecdotal evidence, formulating a hypothesis to scientifically test his ideas, which they limited to an examination of a causal relation between grammatical or lexical structure and cognition or perception. Whorf himself did not advocate a straight causality between language and thought; instead he wrote that "Language and culture had grown up together"; that both were mutually shaped by the other.
Hence, has argued that because the aim of the formulation of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis was to test simple causation, from the outset it failed to test Whorf's ideas.
Focusing on
color term
A color term (or color name) is a word or phrase that refers to a specific color. The color term may refer to human perception of that color (which is affected by visual context) which is usually defined according to the Munsell color system, or t ...
inology, with easily discernible differences between perception and vocabulary, Brown and Lenneberg published in 1954 a study of
Zuni color terms that slightly support a weak effect of semantic categorization of color terms on color perception. In doing so they began a line of empirical studies that investigated the principle of linguistic relativity.
[For more on this topic see: ]Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...
Empirical testing of the Whorfian hypothesis declined in the 1960s to 1980s as
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...
began to redefine linguistics and much of psychology in formal
universalist terms. Several studies from that period refuted Whorf's hypothesis, demonstrating that linguistic diversity is a surface veneer that masks underlying universal cognitive principles.
Many studies were highly critical and disparaging in their language, ridiculing Whorf's analyses and examples or his lack of an academic degree.
[See for example pages 623, 624, 631 in , which is mild in comparison to later writings by , , and ] Throughout the 1980s most mentions of Whorf or of the Sapir–Whorf hypotheses continued to be disparaging, and led to a widespread view that Whorf's ideas had been proven wrong. Because Whorf was treated so severely in the scholarship during those decades, he has been described as "one of the prime whipping boys of introductory texts to linguistics". In the late 1980s, with the advent of
cognitive linguistics
Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are con ...
and
psycholinguistics some linguists sought to rehabilitate Whorf's reputation, as scholarship began to question whether earlier critiques of Whorf were justified.
By the 1960s
analytical philosophers also became aware of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, and philosophers such as
Max Black
Max Black (24 February 1909 – 27 August 1988) was an Azerbaijani-born British-American philosopher who was a leading figure in analytic philosophy in the years after World War II. He made contributions to the philosophy of language, the philo ...
and
Donald Davidson published scathing critiques of Whorf's strong relativist viewpoints. Black characterized Whorf's ideas about metaphysics as demonstrating "amateurish crudity". According to Black and Davidson, Whorf's viewpoint and the concept of linguistic relativity meant that translation between languages with different conceptual schemes would be impossible.
[ notes how Davidson cites an essay by Whorf as claiming that English and Hopi ideas of times cannot 'be calibrated'. But the word "calibrate" does not appear in the essay cited by Davidson, and in the essay where Whorf does use the word he explicitly states that the two conceptualizations ''can'' be calibrated. For Leavitt this is characteristic of the way Whorf has been consistently misread, others such as , and make similar points.] Recent assessments such as those by Leavitt and Lee, however, consider Black and Davidson's interpretation to be based on an inaccurate characterization of Whorf's viewpoint, and even rather absurd given the time he spent trying to translate between different conceptual schemes. In their view the critiques are based on a lack of familiarity with Whorf's writings; according to these recent Whorf scholars a more accurate description of his viewpoint is that he thought translation to be possible, but only through careful attention to the subtle differences between conceptual schemes.
Eric Lenneberg
Eric Heinz Lenneberg (19 September 1921 – 31 May 1975) was a linguist and neurologist who pioneered ideas on language acquisition and cognitive psychology, particularly in terms of the concept of innateness.
Life and career
He was born in D ...
,
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...
, and
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
...
have also criticized Whorf for failing to be sufficiently clear in his formulation of how language influences thought, and for failing to provide real evidence to support his assumptions. Generally Whorf's arguments took the form of examples that were anecdotal or speculative, and functioned as attempts to show how "exotic" grammatical traits were connected to what were considered equally exotic worlds of thought. Even Whorf's defenders admitted that his writing style was often convoluted and couched in neologisms – attributed to his awareness of language use, and his reluctance to use terminology that might have pre-existing connotations. argues that Whorf was mesmerized by the foreignness of indigenous languages, and exaggerated and idealized them. According to
Lakoff, Whorf's tendency to exoticize data must be judged in the historical context: Whorf and the other Boasians wrote at a time in which
racism
Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. It may also mean prejudice, discrimination, or antagonis ...
and
jingoism were predominant, and when it was unthinkable to many that "savages" had redeeming qualities, or that their languages were comparable in complexity to those of Europe. For this alone Lakoff argues, Whorf can be considered to be "Not just a pioneer in linguistics, but a pioneer as a human being".
Today many followers of universalist schools of thought continue to oppose the idea of linguistic relativity, seeing it as unsound or even ridiculous. For example, Steven Pinker argues in his book ''
The Language Instinct
''The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language'' is a 1994 book by Steven Pinker, written for a general audience. Pinker argues that humans are born with an innate capacity for language. He deals sympathetically with Noam Chomsky's claim t ...
'' that thought exists prior to language and independently of it, a view also espoused by philosophers of language such as
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor (; April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017) was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modul ...
,
John Locke and
Plato
Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
. In this interpretation, language is inconsequential to human thought because humans do not think in "natural" language, i.e. any language used for communication. Rather, we think in a meta-language that precedes 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." Scholars of a more "relativist" bent such as
John A. Lucy and
Stephen C. Levinson
Stephen C. Levinson FBA (born 6 December 1947)[LEVINSON, Prof. Stephen Curtis ...](_blank)
have criticized Pinker for misrepresenting Whorf's views and arguing against
strawmen.
[See also ]Nick Yee
Nick Yee is an American researcher who studies self-representation and social interaction in virtual environments.
Biography
Yee earned his bachelor's degree in psychology from Haverford College (with a concentration in computer science) and ...
's evaluation of Pinker's criticism
What Whorf Really Said
and Dan "Moonhawk" Alford's rebuttal of Chomsky's critique a
and ttp://www.hilgart.org/enformy/dma-Chap7.htm The Great Whorf Hypothesis Hoax by Dan Moonhawk Alford.
Resurgence of Whorfianism
Linguistic relativity studies have experienced a resurgence since the 1990s, and a series of favorable experimental results have brought Whorfianism back into favor, especially in
cultural psychology
Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape the psychological processes of their members.Heine, S. J. (2011). ''Cultural Psychology. ''New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
It is based on the premise that mind and culture are i ...
and
linguistic anthropology
Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass mo ...
. The first study directing positive attention towards Whorf's relativist position was
George Lakoff's "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things", in which he argued that Whorf had been on the right track in his focus on differences in grammatical and lexical categories as a source of differences in conceptualization.
In 1992 psychologist John A. Lucy published two books on the topic, one analyzing the intellectual genealogy of the hypothesis, arguing that previous studies had failed to appreciate the subtleties of Whorf's thinking; they had been unable to formulate a research agenda that would actually test Whorf's claims. Lucy proposed a new research design so that the hypothesis of linguistic relativity could be tested empirically, and to avoid the pitfalls of earlier studies which Lucy claimed had tended to presuppose the universality of the categories they were studying. His second book was an empirical study of the relation between grammatical categories and cognition in the
Yucatec Maya language
Yucatec Maya (; referred to by its speakers simply as Maya or as , is one of the 32 Mayan languages of the Mayan language family. Yucatec Maya is spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula and northern Belize. There is also a significant diasporic com ...
of
Mexico
Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...
.
In 1996 Penny Lee's reappraisal of Whorf's writings was published,
reinstating Whorf as a serious and capable thinker. Lee argued that previous explorations of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis had largely ignored Whorf's actual writings, and consequently asked questions very unlike those Whorf had asked. Also in that year a volume, "Rethinking Linguistic Relativity" edited by
John J. Gumperz John Joseph Gumperz (January 9, 1922 – March 29, 2013) was an American linguist and academic. Gumperz was, for most of his career, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His research on the languages of India, on code-switching i ...
and
Stephen C. Levinson
Stephen C. Levinson FBA (born 6 December 1947)[LEVINSON, Prof. Stephen Curtis ...](_blank)
gathered a range of researchers working in
psycholinguistics,
sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural Norm (sociology), norms, expectations, and context (language use), context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on languag ...
and
linguistic anthropology
Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass mo ...
to bring renewed attention to the issue of how Whorf's theories could be updated, and a subsequent review of the new direction of the linguistic relativity paradigm cemented the development. Since then considerable empirical research into linguistic relativity has been carried out, especially at the
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (German: ''Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik''; Dutch: ''Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguïstiek'') is a research institute situated on the campus of Radboud University Nijmegen located ...
with scholarship motivating two edited volumes of linguistic relativity studies, and in American Institutions by scholars such as
Lera Boroditsky and
Dedre Gentner
Dedre Dariel Gentner (born 1944) is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is the Alice Gabriel Twight Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University. She is a leading researcher in the study of analogical reasoning.
Wor ...
.
In turn universalist scholars frequently dismiss as "dull" or "boring",
positive findings of influence of linguistic categories on thought or behavior, which are often subtle rather than spectacular,
[McWhorter misquotes Paul Kay and Willett Kempton's 1984 article "What is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" (), in which they criticize those of Whorf's interpreters who are only willing to accept spectacular differences in cognition. McWhorter attributes the view to Kay and Kempton that they were in fact criticizing.] suggesting that Whorf's excitement about linguistic relativity had promised more spectacular findings than it was able to provide.
Whorf's views have been compared to those of philosophers such as
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his ...
and the late
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is con ...
, both of whom considered language to have important bearing on thought and reasoning. His hypotheses have also been compared to the views of psychologists such as
Lev Vygotsky
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (russian: Лев Семёнович Выго́тский, p=vɨˈɡotskʲɪj; be, Леў Сямёнавіч Выго́цкі, p=vɨˈɡotskʲɪj; – June 11, 1934) was a Soviet psychologist, known for his work on ps ...
, whose
social constructivism
Social constructivism is a sociological theory of knowledge according to which human development is socially situated and knowledge is constructed through interaction with others.
Like social constructionism, social constructivism states th ...
considers the cognitive development of children to be mediated by the social use of language. Vygotsky shared Whorf's interest in gestalt psychology, and he also read Sapir's works. Others have seen similarities between Whorf's work and the ideas of literary theorist
Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin ( ; rus, Михаи́л Миха́йлович Бахти́н, , mʲɪxɐˈil mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪdʑ bɐxˈtʲin; – 7 March 1975) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic and scholar who worked on literary theor ...
, who read Whorf and whose approach to textual meaning was similarly holistic and relativistic. Whorf's ideas have also been interpreted as a radical critique of
positivist science.
Work
Linguistic relativity
Whorf is best known as the main proponent of what he called the principle of linguistic relativity, but which is often known as "the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis", named for him and Edward Sapir. Whorf never stated the principle in the form of a hypothesis, and the idea that linguistic categories influence 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 related to conceptual and behavioral patterns, he pointed towards an empirical research program that has been taken up by subsequent scholars, and which is often called "Sapir–Whorf studies".
Sources of influence on Whorf's thinking
Whorf and Sapir both drew explicitly on
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...
's principle of
general relativity
General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity and Einstein's theory of gravity, is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of gravitation in modern physics ...
; hence linguistic relativity refers to the concept of grammatical and semantic categories of a specific language providing a frame of reference as a medium through which observations are made.
Following an original observation by Boas, Sapir demonstrated that speakers of a given language perceive sounds that are acoustically different as the same, if the sound comes from the underlying
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
and does not contribute to changes in semantic meaning. Furthermore, speakers of languages are attentive to sounds, particularly if the same two sounds come from different phonemes. Such differentiation is an example of how various observational frames of reference leads to different patterns of attention and perception.
Whorf was also influenced by
gestalt psychology
Gestalt-psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology that emerged in the early twentieth century in Austria and Germany as a theory of perception that was a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward ...
, believing that languages require their speakers to describe the same events as different gestalt constructions, which he called "isolates from experience". An example is how the action of cleaning a gun is different in English and
Shawnee
The Shawnee are an Algonquian-speaking indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands. In the 17th century they lived in Pennsylvania, and in the 18th century they were in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, with some bands in Kentucky a ...
: English focuses on the instrumental relation between two objects and the purpose of the action (removing dirt); whereas the Shawnee language focuses on the movement—using an arm to create a dry space in a hole. The event described is the same, but the attention in terms of
figure and ground are different.
Degree of influence of language on thought
If read superficially, some of Whorf's statements lend themselves to the interpretation that he supported
linguistic determinism
Linguistic determinism is the concept that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as categorization, memory, and perception. The term implies that people's native languages will ...
. For example, in an often-quoted passage Whorf writes:
The 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 neo-Whorfians argue that here Whorf is writing about the terms in which we speak of the world, not the terms in which we think of it. Whorf noted that to communicate thoughts and experiences with members of a
speech community
A speech community is a group of people who share a set of linguistic norms and expectations regarding the use of language. It is a concept mostly associated with sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics.
Exactly how to define ''speech ...
speakers must use the linguistic categories of their shared language, which requires moulding experiences into the shape of language to speak them—a process called "thinking for speaking". This interpretation is supported 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. Neo-Whorfians argue this to be a misreading since throughout his work one of his main points was that such systems could be "calibrated" and thereby be made commensurable, but only when we become aware of the differences in conceptual schemes through linguistic analysis.
Hopi time
Whorf's study of Hopi time has been the most widely discussed and criticized example of linguistic relativity. In his analysis he argues that there is a relation between how the
Hopi people conceptualize time, how they speak of temporal relations, and the grammar of the Hopi language. Whorf's most elaborate argument for the existence of linguistic relativity was based on what he saw as a fundamental difference in the understanding of time as a conceptual category among the Hopi.
He argued that the Hopi language, in contrast to English and other
SAE languages, 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. Because of this difference, the language lacks nouns that refer to units of time. He proposed that the Hopi view of time was fundamental in all aspects of their culture and furthermore explained certain patterns of behavior. 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...”
Linguist
Ekkehart Malotki challenged Whorf's analyses of Hopi temporal expressions and concepts with numerous examples how the Hopi language refers to time.
Malotki argues that in the Hopi language the system of tenses consists of future and non-future and that the single difference between the three-tense system of European languages and the Hopi system, is that the latter combines past and present to form a single category.
[It is not uncommon for non-Indo-European languages not to have a three way tense distinction, but instead to distinguish between realis (past/present) and irrealis (future) moods, and describe the past distinction using completive aspect. This, for example, is the case in Greenlandic. But this had not been recognized when Whorf wrote. See ]Bernard Comrie
Bernard Sterling Comrie, (; born 23 May 1947) is a British-born linguist. Comrie is a specialist in linguistic typology, linguistic universals and on Caucasian languages.
Early life and education
Comrie was born in Sunderland, England on 23 ...
's review of Malotki in which he argues that many of Malotki's examples of a tense distinction in fact rather suggest a modality distinction.
Malotki's critique was widely cited as the final piece of evidence in refuting Whorf's ideas and his concept of linguistic relativity while other scholars defended the analysis of Hopi, arguing that Whorf's claim was not that Hopi lacked words or categories to describe temporality, but that the Hopi concept of time is altogether different from that of English speakers.
Whorf described the Hopi categories of
tense, noting that time is not divided into past, present and future, as is common in European languages, but rather a single tense refers to both present and past while another refers to events that have not yet happened and may or may not happen in the future. He also described a large array of stems that he called "tensors" which describes aspects of temporality, but without referring to countable units of time as in English and most European languages.
Contributions to linguistic theory
Whorf's distinction between "overt" (phenotypical) and "covert" (cryptotypical) grammatical categories has become widely influential in linguistics and anthropology. British linguist
Michael Halliday
Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (often M. A. K. Halliday; 13 April 1925 – 15 April 2018) was a British linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistics (SFL) model of language. His grammatical descri ...
wrote about Whorf's notion of the "
cryptotype", and the conception of "how grammar models reality", that it would "eventually turn out to be among the major contributions of twentieth century linguistics".
Furthermore, Whorf introduced the concept of the
allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...
, a word that describes positional phonetic variants of a single superordinate phoneme; in doing so he placed a cornerstone in consolidating early
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
theory. The term was popularized by G. L. Trager and
Bernard Bloch in a 1941 paper on English phonology and went on to become part of standard usage within the American structuralist tradition. Whorf considered allophones to be another example of linguistic relativity. The principle of allophony describes how acoustically different sounds can be treated as reflections of a single
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
in a language. This sometimes makes the different sound appear similar to native speakers of the language, even to the point that they are unable to distinguish them auditorily without special training. Whorf wrote that: "
llophonesare also relativistic. Objectively, acoustically, and physiologically the allophones of
phoneme may be extremely unlike, hence the impossibility of determining what is what. You always have to keep the observer in the picture. What linguistic pattern makes like is like, and what it makes unlike is unlike".(Whorf, 1940)
[Unpublished paper quoted in ]
Central to Whorf's inquiries was the approach later described as
metalinguistics
Metalinguistics is the branch of linguistics that studies language and its relationship to other cultural behaviors. It is the study of dialogue relationships between units of speech communication as manifestations and enactments of co-existence. ...
by G. L. Trager, who in 1950 published four of Whorf's essays as "Four articles on Metalinguistics".
["''Four articles on Metalinguistics''" 1950. Foreign Service Institute, Dept. of State] 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. Whorf saw that the ability to arrive at progressively more accurate descriptions of the world hinged partly on the ability to construct a metalanguage to describe how language affects experience, and thus to have the ability to calibrate different conceptual schemes. Whorf's endeavors have since been taken up in the development of the study of
metalinguistics
Metalinguistics is the branch of linguistics that studies language and its relationship to other cultural behaviors. It is the study of dialogue relationships between units of speech communication as manifestations and enactments of co-existence. ...
and
metalinguistic awareness
Metalinguistic awareness, also known as metalinguistic ability, refers to the ability to consciously reflect on the nature of language. The concept of metalinguistic awareness is helpful in explaining the execution and transfer of linguistic know ...
, first by
Michael Silverstein
Michael Silverstein (12 September 1945 – 17 July 2020) was an American linguist. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. He was a theoretician of se ...
who published a radical and influential rereading of Whorf in 1979 and subsequently in the field of
linguistic anthropology
Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass mo ...
.
Studies of Uto-Aztecan languages
Whorf conducted important work on the
Uto-Aztecan languages, which Sapir had conclusively demonstrated as a valid language family in 1915. Working first on Nahuatl, Tepecano, Tohono O'odham he established familiarity with the language group before he met Sapir in 1928. During Whorf's time at Yale he published several articles on Uto-Aztecan linguistics, such as "Notes on the
Tübatulabal language
Tübatulabal is an extinct Uto-Aztecan language, traditionally spoken in Kern County, California, United States. It is the traditional language of the Tübatulabal, who have now shifted to English. The language originally had three main dialect ...
".
[''Notes on the Tubatulabal Language.'' 1936. ]American Anthropologist
''American Anthropologist'' is the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), published quarterly by Wiley. The "New Series" began in 1899 under an editorial board that included Franz Boas, Daniel G. Brinton, and John W ...
38: 341–44. In 1935 he published "The Comparative Linguistics of Uto-Aztecan",
["The Comparative Linguistics of Uto-Aztecan." 1935. ]American Anthropologist
''American Anthropologist'' is the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), published quarterly by Wiley. The "New Series" began in 1899 under an editorial board that included Franz Boas, Daniel G. Brinton, and John W ...
37:600–608. and a review of
Kroeber's survey of Uto-Aztecan linguistics.
["''review of: Uto-Aztecan Languages of Mexico. A. L. Kroeber''" American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 37, No. 2, Part 1 (Apr. – Jun. 1935), pp.
343–345] Whorf's work served to further cement the foundations of the comparative Uto-Aztecan studies.
The first Native American language Whorf studied was the Uto-Aztecan language
Nahuatl which he studied first from colonial grammars and documents, and later became the subject of his first field work experience in 1930. Based on his studies of
Classical Nahuatl Whorf argued that Nahuatl was an
oligosynthetic language
A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the combin ...
, a typological category that he invented. In Mexico working with native speakers, he studied the dialects of Milpa Alta and Tepoztlán. His grammar sketch of the Milpa Alta dialect of Nahuatl was not published during his lifetime, but it was published posthumously by
Harry Hoijer
Harry Hoijer (September 6, 1904 – March 11, 1976) was a linguist and anthropologist who worked on primarily Athabaskan languages and culture. He additionally documented the Tonkawa language, which is now extinct. Hoijer's few works make up the ...
[''The Milpa Alta dialect of Aztec (with notes on the Classical and the Tepoztlan dialects)''. Written in 1939, first published in 1946 by Harry Hoijer in Linguistic Structures of Native America, pp. 367–97. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, no. 6. New York: Viking Fund.] and became quite influential and used as the basic description of "
Modern Nahuatl" by many scholars. The description of the dialect is quite condensed and in some places difficult to understand because of Whorf's propensity of inventing his own unique terminology for grammatical concepts, but the work has generally been considered to be technically advanced. 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 one of its kind to include detailed phonetic analysis of
supra-segmental phenomena.
In Uto-Aztecan linguistics one of Whorf's achievements was to determine the reason the Nahuatl language has the phoneme , not found in the other languages of the family. The existence of in Nahuatl had puzzled previous linguists and caused Sapir to reconstruct a phoneme for proto-Uto-Aztecan based only on evidence from Aztecan. In a 1937 paper
published in the journal
American Anthropologist
''American Anthropologist'' is the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), published quarterly by Wiley. The "New Series" began in 1899 under an editorial board that included Franz Boas, Daniel G. Brinton, and John W ...
, Whorf argued that the phoneme resulted from some of the
Nahuan or Aztecan languages having undergone a
sound change from the original * to in the position before *. This
sound law
A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chang ...
is known as "
Whorf's law", considered valid although a more detailed understanding of the precise conditions under which it took place has since been developed.
Also in 1937, Whorf and his friend G. L. Trager, published a paper in which they elaborated on the
Azteco-Tanoan[Whorf and Trager suggested the term "Azteco-Tanoan" instead of the label "Aztec-Tanoan" used by Sapir. However, Sapir's original use has stood the test of time.] language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in h ...
, proposed originally by Sapir as a family comprising the Uto-Aztecan and the Kiowa-
Tanoan languages
Tanoan , also Kiowa–Tanoan or Tanoan–Kiowa, is a family of languages spoken by indigenous peoples in present-day New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Most of the languages – Tiwa (Taos, Picuris, Southern Tiwa), Tewa, and Towa – ...
—(the
Tewa
The Tewa are a linguistic group of Pueblo Native Americans who speak the Tewa language and share the Pueblo culture. Their homelands are on or near the Rio Grande in New Mexico north of Santa Fe. They comprise the following communities:
* ...
and
Kiowa language
Kiowa or Cáuijògà/Cáuijò:gyà ("language of the Cáuigù (Kiowa)") is a Tanoan language spoken by the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma in primarily Caddo, Kiowa, and Comanche counties. The Kiowa tribal center is located in Carnegie. Like most Nor ...
s).
[with George L.Trager. ''The relationship of Uto-Aztecan and Tanoan''. (1937). ]American Anthropologist
''American Anthropologist'' is the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), published quarterly by Wiley. The "New Series" began in 1899 under an editorial board that included Franz Boas, Daniel G. Brinton, and John W ...
, 39:609–624.
Maya epigraphy
In a series of published and unpublished studies in the 1930s, Whorf argued that Mayan writing was to some extent phonetic.
While his work on deciphering the Maya script gained some support from Alfred Tozzer at Harvard, the main authority on Ancient Maya culture,
J. E. S. Thompson, strongly rejected Whorf's ideas, saying that Mayan writing lacked a phonetic component and is therefore impossible to decipher based on a linguistic analysis. Whorf argued that it was exactly the reluctance to apply linguistic analysis of Maya languages that had held the decipherment back. Whorf sought for cues to phonetic values within the elements of the specific signs, and never realized that the system was logo-syllabic. Although Whorf's approach to understanding the Maya script is now known to have been misguided, his central claim that the script was phonetic and should be deciphered as such was vindicated by
Yuri Knorozov
Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov (alternatively Knorosov; russian: link=no, Юрий Валентинович Кнорозов; 19 November 1922 – 31 March 1999) was a Soviet-Russian linguist, epigrapher and ethnographer, who is particularly reno ...
's syllabic decipherment of Mayan writing in the 1950s.
Notes
Commentary notes
References
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External links
* B. L. Whorf, .
*
Benjamin Lee Whorf Papers (MS 822). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
What Whorf Really Said – Evaluation of Pinker's (1994) critique of Whorf, by Nick Yee
{{DEFAULTSORT:Whorf, Benjamin Lee
1897 births
1941 deaths
People from Winthrop, Massachusetts
Linguists from the United States
American Mesoamericanists
MIT School of Engineering alumni
Linguists of Mesoamerican languages
Mesoamerican epigraphers
Mayanists
American translation scholars
20th-century Mesoamericanists
Yale University alumni
Linguists of Aztec–Tanoan languages
Linguists of Uto-Aztecan languages
Linguists of Tanoan languages
Paleolinguists
20th-century linguists
Linguists of indigenous languages of North America
American chemical engineers
20th-century American anthropologists