Page "Benjamin Lee Whorf" Paragraph 8

Whorf studied Biblical linguistics mainly at the Watkinson Library ( now Hartford Public Library ).

This library had an extensive collection of materials about Native American linguistics and folklore, originally collected by James Hammond Trumbull.

It was at the Watkinson library that Whorf became friends with the young boy, John B. Carroll, who later went on to study psychology under B. F. Skinner, and who in 1956 edited and published a selection of Whorf's essays as Language, Thought and Reality.

The collection rekindled Whorf's interest in Mesoamerican antiquity.

He began studying the Nahuatl language in 1925, and later, beginning in 1928, he studied the collections of Maya hieroglyphic texts.

Quickly becoming conversant with the materials, he began a scholarly dialog with Mesoamericanists such as Alfred Tozzer, the Maya archaeologist at Harvard University, and Herbert J. Spinden of the Brooklyn Museum.