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 better and more freely to 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. 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. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis was a made-up term by opponents of his work. He also did not use the term linguistic relativity.
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). 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, notably in Language, Thought, and Reality, whose first edition appeared in 1956.