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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 ".

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 ".

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.

Malotki used evidence from archaeological data, calenders, historical documents, modern speech and concluded that there was no evidence that Hopi conceptualize time the way Whorf suggests.

* 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 ).

The so-called Sapir – Whorf Hypothesis is perhaps a misnomer insofar as the approach to science taken by these two differs from the positivist, hypothesis-driven model of science.

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.

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.

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

Richard was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts to Harry and Sarah ( Lee ) Whorf.

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 ".

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 ).

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.

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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Whorf has sometimes been dismissed as an ' amateur ' because of his lack of an advanced degree in linguistics.

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.

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

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 ".

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.

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.

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

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

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 ).

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.