Benjamin Lee Whorf

linguist, b. 24 April 1897 (Winthrop, Massachusetts, USA), d. 26 July 1941 (Wethersfield, Connecticut, USA).

Originally trained as a chemical engineer and working as a fire prevention engineer (inspector) for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, Benjamin Lee Whorf developed an interest in linguistics and anthropology. He began studying linguistics in earnest in 1931 at Yale University, where his mentor Edward Sapir had reaeched considerable fame. Sapir was impressed by Whorf's ideas, and Whorf was appointed Honorary Research Fellow in Anthropology. In 1937 the university awarded him a Fellowship and appointed him as Lecturer in Anthropology. Whorf had to resign in the follwing year due to ill health.

Whorf never took up linguistics as a profession but maintained an independent non-academic source of income. His main work in the area of linguistics was the study of indigenous languages of Mesoamerica, particularly the language of the Hopi. From these studies he developed his "principle of linguistic relativity" that became known in linguistics as the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis". He defined the principle quite loosely, and it has been interpreted in various ways in efforts to reconcile it with observations.

The core of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the belief that the structure of the language a person speaks determines the way in which the person thinks; in other words, the structure of the language determines patterns of cognition. Criticism of the hypothesis was raised immediately after its publication. The scientific and detailed work of Lev Vygotskij in particular has shown that the simple determinism of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is at odds with experimental observation.

Benjamin Lee Whorf died of cancer when he was 44. His most influential work Language, Thought, and Reality was published posthumously in 1956.

Photo: check the copyright status.

home