Sapir-whorf pronunciation

Linguistic determinism vs linguistic relativity
Sapir-whorf hypothesis
Benjamin lee whorf theory

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What Whorf Read and Who Has Been Reading (or Thinking) Whorf

What Whorf Read and Who Has Been Reading (or Thinking) Whorf J O H N L E A V I T T , Département d’Anthropologie, Université de Montréal, 3150 JeanBrillant, Montréal, QC H3T 1N8, Canada. Email: john.leavitt@umontreal.ca The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges says that “every writer creates his precursors. His work changes our conception of the past, as it will change the future.” In his writings, Benjamin Lee Whorf cites a wide and eclectic set of inspirations—which is to say that he creates, retrospectively, a set of intellectual lineages leading up to him. Although some of these are scientiﬁcally respectable—quantum mechanics, relativity, colloidal chemistry, non-Euclidean geometry— others, such as psychoanalysis and “unbiased cultural anthropology,” are less evident for a chemical engineer, and some, such as his fondness for Theosophy and for the work of the occultist Fabre d’Olivet, have been used to discredit him. If we suspend judgment, can we fairly characterize the full ﬁeld of Whorf ’s retrojected precursors? A

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Benjamin Whorf

Benjamin Lee Whorf (April 24, 1897 – July 26, 1941) was an Americanlinguist.

Born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, the son of Harry and Sarah (Lee) Whorf, Benjamin Lee Whorf graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1918 with a degree in chemical engineering and shortly afterwards began work as a fire prevention engineer (inspector) for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, pursuing linguistic and anthropological studies as an avocation.

In 1931 he began studying linguistics at Yale University under the famed Edward Sapir. Sapir was impressed enough with Whorf to further support his academic interests and, in 1936, Whorf was appointed Honorary Research Fellow in Anthropology at Yale. In 1937 the university awarded him the Sterling Fellowship. He was a Lecturer in Anthropology from 1937 through 1938, when he began having serious health problems.

Although he never took up linguistics as a profession (he used to say that having an independent, non-academic source of income allowed him to better and more freely pursue his specific academic int

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Benjamin Brown Whorf (1837 - 1892)

BenjaminBrownWhorf

Born in Wellfleet, Barnstable, Massachusetts, United States

Ancestors

Son of Isaac Whorf Jr. and Chloe Rich (Newcomb) Whorf

Brother of Sally Smith Whorf, Azariah Smith Whorf, Isaac Franklin Whorf, Mary Edney Whorf, Charles E Whorf, Mary Edney Whorf and Henry H Whorf

Descendants

Father of Edgar Lawrence Whorf and Elizabeth Franklin (Whorf) Newcomb

Died at age 55in Wellfleet, Barnstable, Massachusetts, United States

Problems/Questions

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Descendant of Mayflower Passenger:
Henry Samson.

Biography

Benjamin was born in 1837. He is the son of Isaac Whorf and Chloe Newcomb.

Sources

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