Benjamin Lee Whorf

Benjamin Whorf
Benjamin Lee Whorf
Born	April 24, 1897 Winthrop, Massachusetts
Died	July 26, 1941(1941-07-26) (aged 44)
Nationality	American
Fields	linguistics
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known for	Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

Benjamin Lee Whorf (April 24, 1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts – July 26, 1941) was an American linguist. 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 late in his life, 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 published 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. 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".

Biography

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. Shortly thereafter, he began work as a fire prevention engineer (i.e., an inspector) for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, pursuing linguistic and anthropological studies as an avocation.

In 1931, Whorf began studying linguistics at Yale University and soon deeply impressed Edward Sapir, who warmly supported Whorf's academic pursuits. In 1936, Whorf was appointed Honorary Research Fellow in Anthropology at Yale. In 1937, Yale awarded him the Sterling Fellowship. He was a Lecturer in Anthropology from 1937 through 1938, when he began having serious health problems.

Benjamin's younger brother, Richard Whorf, was an actor in films such as Yankee Doodle Dandy and later Emmy nominated television director of such shows as The Beverly Hillbillies.

Whorf died of cancer at the age of 44. He is mainly remembered for a posthumous collection of his work, titled Language, Thought, and Reality, first published in 1956.

Work

Whorf said that having an independent, non-academic source of income allowed him to pursue his specific academic interests more freely. He disseminated his ideas not only by publishing numerous technical articles, but also by writings accessible to lay readers, and by popular lectures.

Whorf's primary area of interest in linguistics was the study of Native American languages, particularly those of Mesoamerica. He became well known for his work on the Hopi language, and for his principle of linguistic relativity. Among Whorf's beliefs about the Hopi was that: “… the Hopi language is seen to contain no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions or that refer directly to what we call “time”, or to past, present, or future…” His understanding of Hopi has been questioned by subsequent scholars. According to Guy Deutscher, for example, Hopi does have a variety of different tenses, but Whorf did not visit the Hopi in their native habitat and his understanding of the language came from one Indian who was living in New York. However, according to a close friend and associate of Whorf's, John B. Carroll, Whorf did indeed spend time with the Hopi in their native habitat in 1938.

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, also known as the Whorfian hypothesis, proposed that language affects thought, and the structure of the language itself affects cognition.

Some of Whorf's early work on linguistics and particularly on linguistic relativity was inspired by reports he wrote on insurance losses, in which misunderstanding based on linguistic confusion had been a contributing factor. In an incident recounted in his essay The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language., Whorf explains how the idea of language affecting thought first came to him. Employed as an investigator for a fire insurance company, his job was to investigate the causes of industrial fires. In his own words:

"My analysis was directed toward purely physical conditions, such as defective wiring, presence or lack of air spaces between metal flues and woodwork, etc., and the results were presented in these terms. ... But in due course it became evident that not only a physical situation qua physics, but the meaning of that situation to people, was sometimes a factor, through the behavior of people, in the start of a fire. And this factor of meaning was clearest when it was a LINGUISTIC MEANING [Whorf's emphasis], residing in the name or the linguistic description commonly applied to this situation. Thus, around a storage of what are called 'gasoline drums,' behavior will tend to a certain type, that is, great care will be exercised; while around a storage of what are called 'empty gasoline drums,' it will tend to be different — careless, with little repression of smoking or of tossing cigarette stubs about. Yet the 'empty' drums are perhaps the more dangerous, since they contain explosive vapor. Physically, the situation is hazardous, but the linguistic analysis according to regular analogy must employ the word 'empty,' which inevitably suggests a lack of hazard. The word 'empty' is used in two linguistic patterns: (1) as a virtual synonym for 'null and void, negative, inert,' (2) applied in analysis of physical situations without regard to, e.g., vapor, liquid vestiges, or stray rubbish, in the container."

In studying the cause of a fire which had started under the conditions just described, Whorf concluded that it was thinking of the "empty" gasoline drums as "empty" in the meaning described in the first definition (1) above, that is as "inert," which led to a fire he investigated. His papers and lectures featured many other examples from his insurance work to support his belief that language shapes understanding.

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). In a series of published and unpublished studies in the 1930s, he argued that Mayan writing was phonetic to some degree. Although many details of his 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.

Selected bibliography

• Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1975) [1933]. The Phonetic Value of Certain Characters in Maya Writing. Millwood, N.Y.: Krauss Reprint. 
• Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1970) [1942]. Maya Hieroglyphs: An Extract from the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1941. Seattle: Shorey Book Store. ISBN 0-8466-0122-2. 
• Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1943). Loan-words in Ancient Mexico. New Orleans: Tulane University of Louisiana. 
• Carroll, John B. (ed.) (1997) [1956]. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ISBN 0-262-73006-5. 

References

Darnell, Regna (2001). Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist Anthropology. Critical studies in the history of anthropology series, vol. 1. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-1710-2. OCLC 44502297. 

External links

• About Whorf.
• B. L. Whorf, "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language"PDF.