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.

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 ".

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.

In a series of published and unpublished studies in the 1930s, Whorf argued that Mayan writing was to some extent phonetic.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

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.

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.

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

He also made the acquaintance of many American linguists and anthropologists, such as Franz Boas, Benjamin Whorf, and Leonard Bloomfield.

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.

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.

Designed by early Minds, the Culture believes ( or perhaps has proved, or else actively made true ) the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis that language influences thought, and Marain was designed to exploit this effect, while also " appealing to poets, pedants, engineers and programmers ".

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

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.

Whorf had met Sapir, the leading US linguist of the day, at professional conferences, and in 1931 Sapir came to Yale from the University of Chicago to take a position as Professor of Anthropology.

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

During his stay at Yale, Whorf acquired this current of thought partly from Sapir and partly through his own readings of Russell and Ogden and Richards.

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.

Whorf Papers at Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives

Also the distinction between a weak and a strong version of the hypothesis is a later invention, as Sapir and Whorf never set up such a dichotomy although in their writings at times their view of this relativity principle are phrased in stronger or weaker terms.

Whorf died in 1941 at age 44 and left behind a number of unpublished papers.

This kind of approach was used by Whorf when he attributed the occurrence of fires at a chemical plant to the workers ' use of the word ' empty ' to describe the barrels containing only explosive vapors.

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.

Láadan is a constructed language created by Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982 to test the Sapir – Whorf Hypothesis, specifically to determine if development of a language aimed at expressing the views of women would shape a culture ; a subsidiary hypothesis was that Western natural languages may be better suited for expressing the views of men than women.

Edwards talked to Peabody Award winning radio personality Mike Whorf about 1776 in an audio interview at Official 1776 web site.

Whorf began his acting career on the Boston stage as a teenager then moved to Broadway at age 21.