Before leaving Whorf presented the paper " Stem series in Maya " at the Linguistic Society of America conference, in which he argued that in the Mayan languages syllables carry symbolic content.

has argued that in this report Whorf's linguistic theories exist in a condensed form and that it was mainly through this report that Whorf exerted influence on the discipline of descriptive linguistics.

Whorf argued that paying attention to how other physical phenomena are described in the study of linguistics could make valuable contributions to science by pointing out the ways in which certain assumptions about reality are implicit in the structure of language itself, and how language guides the attention of speakers towards certain phenomena in the world which risk becoming overemphasized while leaving other phenomena at risk of being overlooked.

In a series of published and unpublished studies in the 1930s, Whorf argued that Mayan writing was to some extent phonetic.

He argued that when Whorf was describing in English how a Hopi speaker's view of time was different, he was in fact translating the Hopi concept into English and therefore disproving the existence of linguistic relativity.

It also reveals that the principle of linguistic relativity was so named because because Whorf saw that idea of his as having similar implications as Einstein's principle of physical relativity.

The term " allophone " was coined by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s.

Benjamin Lee Whorf ( April 24, 1897 – July 26, 1941 ) was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer.

Throughout his life Whorf was a chemical engineer by profession, but as a young man he took up an interest in linguistics.

The son of Harry and Sarah ( Lee ) Whorf, Benjamin Lee Whorf was born on April 24, 1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts.

Harry Church Whorf was an artist, intellectual and designer – first working as a commercial artist and later as a dramatist.

Whorf graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1918 with a degree in chemical engineering where his academic performance was of average quality.

" Whorf was also excellent at attracting new customers to the Fire Insurance Company ; they were impressed by his thorough inspections and recommendations.

Another famous anecdote from his job was used by Whorf to argue that language use affects habitual behavior.

Whorf was a spiritual man throughout his lifetime although what religion he followed has been the subject of debate.

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.

Whorf took on a central role among Sapir's students and was well respected.

In 1936, Whorf was appointed Honorary Research Fellow in Anthropology at Yale, and he was invited by Franz Boas to serve on the committee of the Society of American Linguistics ( later Linguistic Society of America ).

He was a Lecturer in Anthropology from 1937 through 1938, replacing Sapir, who was gravely ill. Whorf gave graduate level lectures on " Problems of American Indian Linguistics ".

Whorf sought for cues to phonetic values within the elements of the specific signs, and never realized that the system was logo-syllabic.

Bardini points out that Engelbart was strongly influenced by the principle of linguistic relativity developed by Benjamin Lee Whorf.

This part of his thinking was developed by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf into the principle of linguistic relativity or the " Sapir-Whorf " hypothesis.

But the reputation he had during his lifetime belies this idea: his academic peers at Yale University considered the " amateur " Whorf to be the best man available to take over Sapir's graduate seminar in Native American linguistics while Sapir was on sabbatical in 1937 – 38.

Malotki used evidence from archaeological data, calenders, historical documents, modern speech and concluded that there was no evidence that Hopi conceptualize time the way Whorf suggests.

Because of the promise shown by his work on Uto-Aztecan, Tozzer and Spinden advised Whorf to apply for a grant with the Social Science Research Council ( SSRC ) to support his research.

*: The article on Whorf states " Drawing on Nietzsche's ideas of perspectivism Alfred Korzybski developed the theory of general semantics which has been compared to Whorf's notions of linguistic relativity.

Whorf is widely known as an advocate for the idea that because of linguistic differences in grammar and usage, speakers of different languages conceptualize and experience the world differently.

This principle has frequently been called the " Sapir – Whorf hypothesis ", after him and his mentor Edward Sapir, but Whorf called it the principle of linguistic relativity, because he saw the idea as having implications similar to Einstein's principle of physical relativity.

Until his return from Mexico in 1930 Whorf had been entirely an autodidact in linguistic theory and field methodology, yet he had already made a name for himself in Middle American linguistics.

Loglan is a constructed language originally designed for linguistic research, particularly for investigating the Sapir – Whorf Hypothesis.

This claim has been derived from the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis, which states that a language ’ s grammatical categories shape the speaker ’ s ideas and actions ; although Andrews says that moderate conceptions of the relation between language and thought are sufficient to support the " reasonable deduction ... cultural change via linguistic change ".

Popularly known as the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, the principle is often defined as having two versions: ( i ) the strong version that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories and ( ii ) the weak version that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behaviour.

Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf came to be seen as the primary proponent as a result of his published observations of how he perceived linguistic differences to have consequences in human cognition and behavior.

The notion of " weak " and " strong " versions of Whorf's principle of linguistic relativity is a misunderstanding of Whorf promulgated by Stuart Chase, whom Whorf considered " utterly incompetent by training and background to handle such a subject.

While Sapir never made a point of studying directly how languages affected the thought processes of their speakers, some notion of ( probably " weak ") linguistic relativity lay inherent in his basic understanding of language, and would be taken up by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf.

Though influential in their own right, these strands of research have not been given much attention in the debate surrounding linguistic relativity, which has tended to center on the American paradigm exemplified by Sapir and Whorf.

More than any other linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf has become associated with what he himself called " the principle of linguistic relativity ".

Among Whorf's well known examples of linguistic relativity are examples of instances where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in English and other European languages ( Whorf used the acronym SAE " Standard Average European " to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of the less-studied languages ).

Since neither Sapir nor Whorf had ever stated an actual hypothesis, Brown and Lenneberg formulated one based on a condensation of the different expressions of the notion of linguistic relativity in their works.

They identified the two tenets of the Whorf thesis as ( i ) " the world is differently experienced and conceived in different linguistic communities " and ( ii ) " language causes a particular cognitive structure ".

It is these two formulations of Roger Brown's which have become widely known and attributed to Whorf and Sapir while in fact the second formulation, verging on linguistic determinism, was never advanced by either of them.