More recently Humboldt has also been credited as an originator of the linguistic relativity hypothesis ( more commonly known as the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis ), developed by linguists Edward Sapir or Benjamin Whorf a century later.

Whorf took a special interest in the Hopi language and started working with Ernest Naquayouma, a speaker of Hopi from Toreva village living in Manhattan, New York.

In a 2003 presentation at an open source convention, Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the programming language Ruby, said that one of his inspirations for developing the language was the science fiction novel Babel-17, based on the Sapir – Whorf Hypothesis.

Whorf said that " of all groups of people with whom I have come in contact, Theosophical people seem the most capable of becoming excited about ideas — new ideas.

Among American linguists, Benjamin Lee Whorf had " the most profound effect on my own thinking ".

Whorf " showed how it is that human beings do not all mean alike, and how their unconscious ways of meaning are among the most significant manifestations of their culture "

Pinker sets out to disabuse the reader of a number of common ideas about language, e. g. that children must be taught to use it, that most people's grammar is poor, that the quality of language is steadily declining, that language has a heavy influence on a person's possible range of thoughts ( the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis ), and that nonhuman animals have been taught language ( see Great Ape language ).

The Native American languages Nahuatl and Blackfoot have in the past been claimed to exhibit oligosynthetic qualities ( most notably by Benjamin Whorf ).

Where Whorf reasoned that the sophistication of a language controls the sophistication of the thoughts that can be expressed by a speaker of that language, Engelbart reasoned that the state of our current technology controls our ability to manipulate information, and that fact in turn will control our ability to develop new, improved technologies.

*: 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 taught his seminar on " Problems of American Indian Linguistics ".

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

Having been told what the plant produced, Whorf wrote a chemical formula on a piece of paper, saying to the director: " I think this is what you're doing ".

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.

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.

Whorf took Sapir's first course at Yale on " American Indian Linguistics ".

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

Sapir also encouraged Whorf to continue his work on the historical and descriptive linguistics of Uto-Aztecan.

Whorf published several articles on that topic in this period, some of them with G. L. Trager, who had become his close friend.

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 ".

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.

Also in 1937, Whorf and his friend G. L. Trager, published a paper in which they elaborated on the Azteco-Tanoan language family, proposed originally by Sapir as a family comprising the Uto-Aztecan and the Kiowa-Tanoan languages —( the Tewa and Kiowa languages ).

Many of his stories, such as Gulf, If This Goes On —, and Stranger in a Strange Land, depend strongly on the premise, related to the well-known Sapir – Whorf hypothesis, that by using a correctly designed language, one can change or improve oneself mentally, or even realize untapped potential ( as in the case of Joe Green in Gulf ).

Empirical research into the question has been associated mainly with the names of Benjamin Lee Whorf, who wrote on the topic in the 1930s, and his mentor Edward Sapir, who did not himself write extensively on the topic.

Drawing on influences such as Humboldt or Friedrich Nietzsche some European thinkers developed similar ideas to those of Sapir and Whorf, generally working in isolation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Benjamin Whorf identifies four varieties ( dialects ) of Hopi:

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

In his application Whorf proposed to establish the oligosynthetic nature of the Nahuatl language.

As Whorf became more influenced by positivist science he also distanced himself from some approaches to language and meaning that he saw as lacking in rigor and insight.

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.

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.

This usage has been criticized as a misnomer, since Sapir and Whorf did not in fact formulate a hypothesis for empirical research, and because it is unclear to what extent Sapir actually subscribed to the idea of language influencing thought.

This formulation implicitly acknowledges that Sapir and Whorf were not the first or only scholars to have theorized about relations between language and thought and that other strands of thinking about the issue also exist.

This view has sometimes been attributed to Benjamin Lee Whorf, and to Ludwig Wittgenstein, but it is not currently the consensus that either of these thinkers actually espoused determinist views of the relation between language and thought.

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.

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 ).

Another example in which Whorf attempted to show that language use affects behavior came from his experience in his day job as a chemical engineer working for an insurance company as a fire inspector.

He did not address the fact that Whorf was not principally concerned with translatability, but rather with how the habitual use of language influences habitual behavior.

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 ".

Kenneth E. Iverson, the originator of the APL programming language, believed that the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis applied to computer languages ( without actually mentioning the hypothesis by name ).