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

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.

Whorf credited Naquayouma as the source of most of his information on the Hopi language, although in 1938 he took a short field trip to the village of Mishongnovi, on the Second Mesa of the Hopi Reservation in Arizona.

The succeeding director, Richard Whorf, took over the reins for one season and was in turn followed by former actor-turned-director Gene Reynolds from 1962 to 1964.

Five years later Aaron turned the Dennison Manufacturing Company over to his younger brother, Eliphalet Whorf Dennison, who took over and developed the company into a sizable industrial enterprise.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, advances in cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics renewed interest in the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis.

It is perhaps of interest that the test and exemplification of this in The Form of Information in Science ( 1989 ) vindicates in some degree the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis.

As a note of interest, it was Hoijer who coined the term " Sapir – Whorf hypothesis ".

Malotki used evidence from archaeological data, calenders, historical documents, modern speech and concluded that there was no evidence that Hopi conceptualize time the way Whorf suggests.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

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 ).

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.

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 ".

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 ).

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 ).

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.

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

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.

* The unresolved issue of linguistic relativity ( associated with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf but actually brought to American linguistics by Franz Boas working within a theoretical framework going back to European thinkers from Vico to Herder to Humboldt ).

Benjamin Whorf, while working as a student of Edward Sapir, posited that a person's thinking depends on the structure and content of their social group's language.

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 described a workplace in which full gasoline drums were stored in one room and empty ones in another ; he said that because of flammable vapor the " empty " drums were more dangerous than those that were full, although workers handled them less carefully to the point that they smoked in the room with " empty " drums, but not in the room with full ones.

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.

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.

In addition to Nahuatl, Whorf studied the Piman and Tepecano languages, while in close correspondence with linguist J. Alden Mason.

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 SSRC awarded Whorf the grant and in 1930 he traveled to Mexico City where Professor Robert H Barlow put him in contact with several speakers of Nahuatl to serve as his informants, among whom were Mariano Rojas of Tepoztlán and Luz Jimenez of Milpa Alta.

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

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.

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

Along with McLuhan, Postman, and Anton, media ecology draws from many authors, including the work of Harold Innis, Walter Ong, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Eric Havelock, Susanne Langer, Erving Goffman, Edward T. Hall, George Herbert Mead, Margaret Mead, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and Gregory Bateson.

Along with Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herder was one of the first to argue that language determines thought, a theme that two centuries later would be central to the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis.

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