Background
Whorf, Benjamin Lee was born on April 24, 1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts, United States.
social anthropologist philosopher of language
Whorf, Benjamin Lee was born on April 24, 1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts, United States.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I nils: Edward Sapir.
Whorf held no academic posts. He pursued the career of fire prevention officer.
Whorf’s views were formed under the guidance of Edward Sapir and through his own studies of Maya and Hopi Indian languages. He offered the hypothesis that the belief that the cognitive processes of all human beings possess a universal structure which operates prior to and independently of linguistic communication is erroneous. He held that the linguistic patterns themselves profoundly influence what we perceive in the world and how we think about it. Since these patterns vary widely, the modes of thinking and perceiving in groups utilizing different languages will result in basically different worldview's. Thus Whorf introduced ’a new principle of relativity’, according to which all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same Weltanschauung. Whorf exemplified this principle especially by contrasting Indo-European languages to Hopi. Whereas the former, he noted, have parts of speech, separable subject and predicate and emphasize time, Hopi does not, but rather signifies an event as a whole and without temporal distinctions. This, he maintained, means that the Hopi Weltanschauung is quite different from our own. though ‘equally valid’. The Whorfian hypothesis of the linguistic relativity of the categories of cognition is embedded in a powerful current of contemporary thought. But Whorf’s hypothesis has been changed over time through its iterations in various disciplines and studies: for example, where Whorf focused on the influence of language on thought, later iterations frequently focus on language determining thought.