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Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf
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The pioneering linguist Benjamin Whorf (1897--1941) gra...)
The pioneering linguist Benjamin Whorf (1897--1941) grasped the relationship between human language and human thinking: how language can shape our innermost thoughts. His basic thesis is that our perception of the world and our ways of thinking about it are deeply influenced by the structure of the languages we speak. The writings collected in this volume include important papers on the Maya, Hopi, and Shawnee languages as well as more general reflections on language and meaning.
Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf
(2011 Reprint of 1956 Edition. Full facsimile of the origi...)
2011 Reprint of 1956 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. The hypothesis suggested by Whorf that the structure of a person's language is a factor in the way in which he understands reality and behaves with respect to it has attracted the attention of linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, as well as a large segment of the public. This is a collection of important essays published by Whorf over the course of his lifetime.
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
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Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (The MIT Press)
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Writings by a pioneering linguist, including his famous...)
Writings by a pioneering linguist, including his famous work on the Hopi language, general reflections on language and meaning, and the "Yale Report."
The pioneering linguist Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941) grasped the relationship between human language and human thinking: how language can shape our innermost thoughts. His basic thesis is that our perception of the world and our ways of thinking about it are deeply influenced by the structure of the languages we speak. The writings collected in this volume include important papers on the Maya, Hopi, and Shawnee languages, as well as more general reflections on language and meaning.
Whorf's ideas about the relation of language and thought have always appealed to a wide audience, but their reception in expert circles has alternated between dismissal and applause. Recently the language sciences have headed in directions that give Whorf's thinking a renewed relevance. Hence this new edition of Whorf's classic work is especially timely.
The second edition includes all the writings from the first edition as well as John Carroll's original introduction, a new foreword by Stephen Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics that puts Whorf's work in historical and contemporary context, and new indexes. In addition, this edition offers Whorf's "Yale Report," an important work from Whorf's mature oeuvre.
Benjamin Lee Whorf was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer.
Background
Benjamin Lee Whorf was born on April 24, 1897 in Winthrop, Massachussets, the eldest of three sons of Harry Church Whorf and Sarah Edna (Lee) Whorf, both of early New England descent. The father was by profession a commercial artist, but avocationally a dramatist, stage designer, and popular lecturer. Whorf's brothers both had successful careers, John as an artist known for his watercolors and Richard as an actor, playwright, and director in New York and Hollywood.
Education
Benjamin Whorf graduated from the Winthrop high school in 1914 and entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he obtained a B. S. degree in chemical engineering in 1918.
Career
He joined a training program in fire prevention engineering at the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, in whose employ he remained for the rest of his life, becoming widely respected as an expert in industrial fire prevention. His enduring renown, however, rests on his avocational work in linguistic theory. Early in his career Whorf developed the habit of self-directed reading and inquiry in his off hours and during his frequent business trips. An interest in religious problems, set off by the seeming conflict between his Methodist upbringing and his scientific training, led him to study Hebrew and the works of A. Fabre d'Olivet, an early nineteenth-century French mystic who believed that the phonetic elements of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet were a key to their primitive, God-given meanings. Whorf sought parallels for this concept in such American Indian languages as Aztec and Maya, and in so doing became interested in problems of comparative linguistics, as well as in the problem of deciphering Maya hieroglyphic writing. About 1927 he started to correspond with scholars in Mexican archaeology and linguistics, notably Herbert J. Spinden and Alfred M. Tozzer. On their advice he sought and obtained a grant from the Social Science Research Council to make field studies in Mexico. During a very few weeks spent in Mexico in 1930, Whorf amassed data that became the basis for several important studies, for example his sketch of the Milpa Alta dialect of Nahuatl, published posthumously in Harry Hoijer's Linguistic Structures of Native America (1946). When Edward Sapir, the most prominent American linguist of the period, came to take the chair of anthropology and linguistics at Yale in 1931, Whorf became a part-time graduate student there (1931 - 32). Sapir put before him theories, techniques, and problems of contemporary interest in American Indian linguistics and in linguistics generally; his ideas concerning the relations of language, thought, and meaning were especially appealing to Whorf. With Sapir's encouragement, Whorf made intensive studies of the Hopi language, partly in the field, in Arizona, and partly with the help of a native informant who lived in New York City. It was chiefly from this work that Whorf's theory of linguistic relativity - the notion that the structure of the particular language a person speaks influences his patterns of thought and action - emerged. He presented his ideas in a number of technical articles in Language and other professional journals, but they came to wide notice through three semipopular essays originally published in M. I. T. 's Technology Review in 1940-41: "Science and Linguistics, " "Linguistics as an Exact Science, " and "Languages and Logic. " These and other works were reprinted in 1956 in a collection entitled Language, Thought, and Reality. During the last ten years of his life, Whorf was a prominent and highly respected linguistic scientist, even in his "amateur" status. He told his friends that the emoluments and conditions of his regular employment actually made it easier for him to pursue scholarly work than if he were in academic life. Only once, in 1937-38, did he hold a teaching appointment, as lecturer in anthropology at Yale, on leave from his insurance position. Whorf died of cancer at his home in Wethersfield, Connecticut, at the age of forty-four; his ashes were placed in the cemetery in Winthrop, Massachussets.
A tall but rather frail person, he moved and talked deftly and gracefully. Without seeming to have great energy, he nevertheless accomplished a prodigious amount of work with impressive efficiency.
Connections
On November 6, 1920, Whorf married Celia Inez Peckham of Old Lyme, Connecticut; they had three children, Raymond Ben, Robert Peckham, and Celia Lee.