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The son of Harry Church Whorf and Sarah Edna Lee Whorf, Benjamin Atwood Lee Whorf was born on April 24, 1897, in Winthrop, Massachusetts. His father was an artist, intellectual, and designer – first working as a commercial artist and later as a dramatist. Whorf had two younger brothers, John and Richard, who both went on to become notable ...
More than any linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf has become associated with what he termed the "linguistic relativity principle". [39] Studying Native American languages, he attempted to account for the ways in which grammatical systems and language-use differences affected perception. Whorf's opinions regarding the nature of the relation between ...
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis branches out into two theories: linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. Linguistic determinism is viewed as the stronger form – because language is viewed as a complete barrier, a person is stuck with the perspective that the language enforces – while linguistic relativity is perceived as a weaker form of the theory because language is discussed as a ...
This part of his thinking was developed by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf into the principle of linguistic relativity or the "Sapir–Whorf" hypothesis. In anthropology Sapir is known as an early proponent of the importance of psychology to anthropology , maintaining that studying the nature of relationships between different individual ...
In Whorf's analysis, by using the reportive form the speaker claims that the event has in fact occurred or is still occurring, whereas by using the expective form the speaker describes an expectation of a future event. Whorf says that the expective can be used to describe events in the past, giving the meaning of "was going to" or "would." [28]
The research article "The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Probabilistic Inference: Evidence from the Domain of Color" [32] seeks to clarify the argument through the lens of probabilistic inference. The probabilistic model is a conjunction of both a universal color space and a language-specific categorical organization of that space.
Early in his life, Carroll became interested in music and language. His interest in language was furthered by his friendship with Benjamin Lee Whorf at the age of thirteen and discussing Whorf's ideas about a close connection between culture and language. Carroll also helped to edit and publish Whorf's Language, Thought and Reality in 1956. [1] [4]
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity put forth by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, holds that the language we speak both affects and reflects our view of the world. This idea is also reflected in the concept behind general semantics. In a popular 1940 article on the subject, Whorf referred to Eskimo languages having several words for snow: