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 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.

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.

*: 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.

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.

The Languages of Pao is a science fiction novel by Jack Vance, first published in 1958, in which the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis is a central theme.

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.

sacred — sacred and the profane — sampling — sampling frame — sanction — Sapir – Whorf hypothesis — scapegoating — schizophrenia — science — Second World — secondary data — secondary deviance — secondary group — secondary group structure — secondary labor market — sect — secularization — self — self-consciousness — semi-periphery countries — semiotics — serial monogamy — serial reciprocity — sex — sex role — sex stratification — sexism — sexual harassment — sexual script — sick role — significant other — simulation — situational identity — snowball sampling — for entries beginning with social, see sections below — socialism — socialization — society — sociobiology — sociocultural context — sociocultural evolution — for entries beginning with sociological, see sections below — sociocultural materialism — sociology — for entries beginning with sociology of, see sections below — solid waste — solidarity — sovereignty — split labor market theory — standing army — state ( polity ) — state society — stateless nation — status — status group — status inconsistency — status offense — stem cell — stepfamily — stereotype — stigma — stigmatise — Strategic Defense Initiative — stratification — strike — structural unemployment — structuration — structure — subculture — suburbanization — surplus value — surveillance — survey — symbol — Symbolic Convergence Theory — symbolic interactionism — symbolic system — symbolic world — systems theory

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 " 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 "

At Yale, Whorf joined the circle of Sapir's students that included such luminary linguists as Morris Swadesh, Mary Haas, Harry Hoijer, G. L. Trager and Charles F. Voegelin.

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.

Harry Hoijer, one of Sapir's students, introduced the term " Sapir – Whorf hypothesis ", even though the two scholars never actually advanced any such hypothesis.

The Sapir – Whorf hypothesis influenced the development and standardization of Interlingua during the first half of the 20th Century, but this was largely due to Sapir's direct involvement.

His students included Fang-kuei Li, Benjamin Whorf, Mary Haas, and Harry Hoijer.

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.

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.

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

Whorf argued that it was exactly the reluctance to apply linguistic analysis of Maya languages that had held the decipherment back.

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.

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.