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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 to better and more freely 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 and Mesoamerican languages. He became quite well known for his work on the Hopi language, and for a theory he called the principle of linguistic relativity. Developed in conjunction with Sapir (who had already published a version of it in 1929) it became more widely known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. 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 cultureThe word culture comes from the Latin root colere (to inhabit, to cultivate, or to honor). In general it refers to human activity; different definitions of culture reflect different theories for understanding, or criteria for valuing, human activity. in which it resides) affects the way that they think, meaning that the structure of the language itself affects cognition.
Less well known, but important, are his contributions to the study of the Nahuatl and MayaThe word Maya or maya can refer to: the Maya a native American people of southern Mexico and northern Central America the modern Maya people the pre-Columbian Maya civilization the Maya language Maya a concept in Hindu/ Vedic philosophy a state of misperc languages. He claimed that Nahuatl was an oligosynthetic language (a claim that would be brought up again some twenty years later by Swadesh , another controversial American linguist, and, more recently, by HerreraErnst Herrera Legorreta is a Computer Scientist, Linguist, Biological Anthropologist. He is the creator of the functional-multidimensional NGL programming language, the first general purpose programming language developed in Mexico. In early 2004, Herrera, a Mexican 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. Of him, George LakoffGeorge P. Lakoff is a professor of linguistics (in particular, cognitive linguistics) at the University of California, Berkeley where he has taught since 1972. Although some of his research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, such as th, a well known American linguist, has said: