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Benjamin Whorf

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	Benjamin Whorf - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Whorf's primary area of interest in linguistics was the study of native American languages, particularly those of Mesoamerica.
		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 Systematization of the Whorf Hypothesis." Anthropological Linguistics 1(1959): 31-35.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Benjamin_Whorf (1773 words)

	Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Whorf's formulation of this "principle of linguistic relativity" is often stereotyped as a "prisonhouse" view of language in which one's thinking and behavior is completely and utterly shaped by one's language.
		Whorf's close analysis of the differences between English and (in one famous instance) the Hopi language raised the bar for an analysis of the relationship between language, thought, and reality by relying on close analysis of grammatical structure, rather than a more impressionistic account of the differences between, say, vocabulary items in a language.
		Whorf was a chemist by training and worked in the insurance industry as a fire prevention engineer.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Sapir-Whorf_Hypothesis (2619 words)

	The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-16)
		Whorf devised the weaker theory of linguistic relativity: "We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe..." (1940/1956).
		Schlesinger attacks Whorf's flimsy thesis support: "...the mere existence of such linguistic diversities is insufficient evidence for the parallelist claims of a correspondence between language on the one hand and cognition and culture, on the other, and for the determinist claim of the latter being determined by the former" (1991:18).
		Schlesinger agrees: "Whorf made far-reaching claims about the pervasive effects of language on the mental life of a people, and all that experimental psychologists managed to come up with were such modest results as the effect of the vocabulary of a language on the discriminability of color chips" (1991:30).
	www.angelfire.com /journal/worldtour99/sapirwhorf.html (3081 words)

	Benjamin Whorf (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-16)
		In 1913, Whorf graduated with a Bachelors Degree in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 1919 he was appointed an Engineer for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company.
		Whorf began studying Linguistics at Yale University in 1931 because he was concerned about the conflict between science and religion.
		Whorf studied Linguistics in his spare time as a way to create an understanding of how language worked and unfortunately, he died before much of his studies could be proven.
	www.mnsu.edu /emuseum/information/biography/uvwxyz/whorf_benjamin.html (377 words)

	Untitled Document (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-16)
		Whorf argues that the differences between SAE and Hopi linguistic systems are expressed in the cultural behaviours of their speakers.
		Whorf says that, "To the Hopi, for whom time is not a motion but a 'getting later' of everything that has ever been done, unvarying repetition is not wasted but accumulated" (151).
		Whorf makes it clear that the accident described was caused as a result of habitual thinking which reflects linguistic usage.
	www.onemansopinion.org /whorf.html (1585 words)

	What Whorf Really Said
		Whorf does not mean that the Hopi do not understand what time is; he claims that the Hopi do not see time and use tenses the way we do.
		Whorf, in an analysis of Hopi grammar, wrote that "in Hopi however all phase terms, like 'summer, morning', etc., are not nouns but a kind of adverb" (Whorf, pg.
		Whorf suggests that we have problems with this counterintuitive situation because our grammar forces us to construct sentences and in turn ideas into actor-action pairs where events are caused by something else.
	www.nickyee.com /ponder/whorf.html (4209 words)

	Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Info - Encyclopedia WikiWhat.com (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-16)
		Sapir and Whorf took this one step further by arguing that a person's world view is largely determined by the vocabulary and syntax available in his or her language (linguistic determinism).
		Whorf in fact called his version of the theory the Principle of Linguistic Relativity.
		A possible argument against the extreme ("Weltanschauung") version of this idea, that all thought is constrained by language, can be discovered through personal experience: all people have occasional difficulty expressing themselves due to constraints in the language, and are conscious that the language is not adequate for what they mean.
	www.wikiwhat.com /encyclopedia/s/sa/sapir_whorf_hypothesis.html (1096 words)

	Current Research on the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis
		Whorf was careful to avoid authoritative statements which would permanently commit him to a particular position.
		Whorf believes that humans may be able to think only about objects, processes, and conditions that have language associated with them (linguistic determinism).
		Whorf demonstrated that culture is largely determined by language (linguistic relativity).
	www.geocities.com /CollegePark/4110/whorf.html (1838 words)

	Benjamin Whorf biography .ms (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-16)
		Benjamin Lee Whorf (April 24, 1897 - July 26, 1941) was an American linguist.
		Whorf's primary area of interest in linguistics was the study of native American and Mesoamerican languages.
		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 it resides) affects the way that they think, meaning that the structure of the language itself affects cognition.
	benjamin-whorf.biography.ms (1758 words)

	The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis: A Supplement to Relativism
		Whorf presents a moving target, with most of his claims coming in both extreme and in more cautious forms.
		The passages from Sapir and Whorf bristle with metaphors of coercion: our thought is “at the mercy” of our language, it is “constrained” by it; no one is free to describe the world in a neutral way; we are “compelled” to read certain features into the world (p.
		It is worth noting, finally, that although Whorf was certainly a descriptive relativist he was not a normative relativist.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/relativism/supplement2.html (4009 words)

	What We Do With Language and What It Does With Us (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-16)
		According to psychologist Steven Pinker, both Whorf and Korzybski presented linguistic relativity as a single-valued, absolutistic and uni-directional belief that “language determines thought.” 3 This “strong version” (and ‘weaker’ ones as well) of the supposed Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is “wrong, all wrong” 4 claims Pinker (widely accepted as an expert in linguistics and psychology).
		Whorf, who died in his forties, noted but was not able to elaborate much on the more practical implications of linguistic relativity.
		Whorf did not deny that the Hopi have used dating or calendars, counted the number of days or duration of events, etc. What he did claim was that the Hopi did not conceptualize “space or time as such” in the reified manner that we do in English and other Indo-European languages.
	www.driveyourselfsane.com /dtibook/whatwedowithlanguage.html (3700 words)

	Demise of the Whorf Hypothesis (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-16)
		The most complete anthology of Whorf's writings was published in 1956, edited by John Carroll, but this followed a 1952 printing of the last four articles Whorf wrote in his brief lifetime (he died at the age of 44), which set off a flurry of academic discussions and conferences.
		Unfortunately for Whorf, the incredible amount of national attention focused on Noam Chomsky and his generative transformational grammar in the late '50s and early '60s resulted in resounding denunciations of Whorf by Chomskyan proponents—and in that highly negative atmosphere, it was not fashionable among linguists to read Whorf or discuss his ideas in public.
		To imply that Whorf's ability to translate is evidence contrary to his "hypothesis" is therefore indefensible, since Whorf was a comparative linguist cognizant of the traps of habitual language by his awareness of alternate language worldviews—something quite beyond the average monolingual.
	www.enformy.com /dma-dwh.htm (4825 words)

	The Mind of Benjamin Whorf
		Benjamin Lee Whorf was an amateur linguistic, it is true, but he was as well an amateur evolutionary biologist, botanist, theologian, and physicist, and his advocacy of linguistic relativity cannot be understand separately from his other avocations.
		Whorf remained with the Hartford for the rest of his short life, developing a national reputation as an expert in industrial fire prevention and authoring several articles on the subject, including one, "Blazing Icicles," that offered a linguistic interpretation of fire prevention.
		Or think of Whorf's older contemporary C. Jung (1875-1961), who, anxious not to abandon the scientific stance of his patriarch, Sigmund Freud, struggled throughout his career to couch his thoroughly esoteric and mystical ideas in the language of science.
	mtsu32.mtsu.edu:11072 /Whorf/mindblw.htm (3778 words)

	Whorf, Benjamin Lee on Encyclopedia.com (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-16)
		Although he was trained in chemical engineering and worked for an insurance company, Whorf made substantial contributions to Mayan and Aztec linguistics.
		He collaborated with Edward Sapir at Yale Univ. in anthropological linguistics, and helped to develop the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
		Instead, it posits language as a finite array of formal (lexical and grammatical) categories that group an infinite variety of experiences into usable classes, vary across cultures, and, as a guide to the interpretation of experiences, influence thought.
	www.encyclopedia.com /html/w/whorf-b1e.asp (352 words)

	Keywords » Whorf (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-16)
		Whorf wasn’t really talking about our “perception of reality.” Whorf’s point was that some cultural differences in behavior where linked to conceptual differences arising from linguistic analogies.
		The heart of Whorf’s argument is that the Hopi practice of conducting rituals today to affect the events of tomorrow derives from the analogies drawn from grammatical differences in how English and Hopi deal with the cyclical aspects of time.
		The best work, in my opinion, was done by Whorf, anyway, and when Whorf died, linguistic relativity went into a kind of stasis, with no one around to defend or advance it until it’s “rediscovery” in the last decade or so.
	keywords.oxus.net /archives/2004/08/21/whorf (2445 words)

	Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
		Whorf, realising how vitally important the concept of time is in Western physics (for, without it, there can be no velocity or acceleration) developed an idea of what a Hopi physics might look like.
		Whorf would presumably ask much the same question, though he might not suppose that our Anglophone order of thought is necessarily 'normal'.
		The evidence for it which was cited by Whorf seems simply to be wrong; he undermines his own argument in translating from the Hopi and in imagining what ought by his own argument to be unimaginable; in any case we can all readily think of examples which suggest that Whorf's claims are simply silly.
	www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk /MUHome/cshtml/introductory/sapirw.html (1974 words)

	Ontology and the Linguistic Relativity (Sapir-Whorf) Hypothesis
		Whorf argued that each language refers to an infinite variety of experiences with a finite array of formal categories (both lexical and grammatical) by trouping experiences together as analogically `the same' for the purposes of speech.
		When speakers attempt to interpret an experience in terms of a category available in their language they automatically involve the other meanings implicit in that particular category (analogy) and in the overall configuration of categories in which it is embedded.
		In this changed intellectual climate, and in the light of the much greater knowledge that we now have about both language and mental processing, it would be pointless to attempt to revive ideas about linguistic relativity in their original form.
	www.formalontology.it /linguistic-relativity.htm (3008 words)

	Whorf Hypothesis (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-16)
		Whorf coined what was once called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is more properly referred to as the Whorf hypothesis.
		Whorf fully believed in linguistic determinism; that what one thinks is fully determined by their language.
		Perhaps Whorf's data would have been more conclusive had he spent time visiting many Hopi speakers in their native environments instead of studying one man and only visiting his place of origin once.
	www.mnsu.edu /emuseum/cultural/language/whorf.html (1330 words)

	Chomsky's Rebuttal of Whorf: The Annotated Version by Moonhawk (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-16)
		Whorf never in all of his writings formulated a single hypothesis that I can find; he did however formulate a principle, which is of a different order of scientific nomenclature than a hypothesis--which Whorf knew, but has still 50 years later not become clear to all "scientific" linguists.
		It's difficult to know here whether Chomsky means that Whorf's description of "tense" or "time" in SAE is incorrect, or his entire description of SAE (p134-159), including notions of naming, plurality and numeration, nouns of physical quality, phases of cycles, temporal forms of verbs, duration, intensity and tendency, habitual thought, habitual behavior.
		If it turned out that Whorf is correct, this would further substantiate my feeling that studies of linguistic relativity are entirely premature, since his correct guess would have been based on no evidence of substance and no defensible formal analysis of English structure.
	www.enformy.com /dma-chm0.htm (1633 words)

	Works Consulted
		"Peirce, Frege, Saussure, and Whorf: 'The Semiotic Mediation of Ontology.'" In Elizabeth Mertz and Richard J.
		Lucy, John A. "Whorf's View of the Linguistic Mediation of Thought." In Mertz,and Parmentier eds.
		Schultz, Emily A. Dialogue at the Margins: Whorf Bakhtin, and Linguistic Relativity.
	mtsu32.mtsu.edu:11072 /Whorf/blwbib.htm (1147 words)

	One Man's Opinion » Things My Language Told Me to Say (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-16)
		Sapir and Whorf were anthropologists in the early part of the 20th century, students of Franz Boas and strongly influenced by his largely undeveloped (by Boas, that is) relativism.
		Whorf saw this "deep structure" as varying between populations, though--good Saussurean that he is--he doesn't get into the problem of origins.
		The über-hangup for most people thinking about Whorf is the determinism, which implies both a lack of agency on the part of language users and an inflexibility in the language itself.
	www.onemansopinion.org /pivot/pivot/entry.php?id=58 (1185 words)

	Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
		Brown (1958) and Lenneberg (1953) pointed out that Whorf never met an actual Indian, so his assessments of their character must be somewhat vague, and also that his translations of Hopi sentences were done to seem as different as possible, to emphasise the ‘different system of thinking’.
		In addition, Whorf’s arguments on Hopi character are based on Hopi language, making his argument circular, and therefore useless.
		Whorf quoted the fact that the Hopi have one word for everything that flies (insects, planes, etc), and Crystal uses the example of the Pintupi language — having one word (katarta) for 'the hole left by a goanna when it has broken the surface after hibernation' (Crystal 1993).
	www.aber.ac.uk /media/Students/njp0001.html (2526 words)

	Berta Walker Gallery : Artists : Nancy Whorf
		Nancy Whorf is known for her vibrant, expansive Provincetown scenes.
		Whorf says her work is "thoughtful and sentimental." She is creating a kind of visual memoir.
		At the age of 14, Nancy Whorf began her formal art study as a folk artist decorating furniture for Peter Hunt and for twenty years owned a shop in Wellfleet that sold her painted furniture.
	www.bertawalker.com /artists/n_whorf.html (406 words)

	Whorf 11
		For example, the immediately following questions are to be answered as Benjamin Whorf would answer them, given his thinking as expressed in this paper.
		If you disagree with Whorf, you must answer these questions AS IF you agreed with him.
		If there is more than one answer that seems correct, choose the one that would have been given by Whorf.
	www.chass.utoronto.ca /~ikalmar/425/425oldex.html (3011 words)

	Benjamin Whorf (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-16)
		Sapir fue impresionado suficientes con Whorf para soportar más lejos sus intereses académicos y, en 1936, Whorf fue designado compañero honorario de la investigación en antropología en Yale.
		También a veces llamó la hipótesis de Whorfian (mucho a la desaprobación de Whorf) las demandas de esta teoría que la lengua que una persona habla (independent de la cultura en la cual reside) afecta la manera que piensan, significando que la estructura de la lengua sí mismo afecta la cognición.
		Las heces Whorf de Benjamin murieron de cáncer en la edad relativamente joven de 44, y mucho de su trabajo más importante fue publicado posthumously.
	www.yotor.net /wiki/es/be/Benjamin%20Whorf.htm (2183 words)

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