Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf

Writings by a pioneering linguist, including his famous work on the Hopi language, general reflections on language and meaning, and the "Yale Report." The pioneering linguist Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941) grasped the relationship between human language and human thinking: how language can shape our innermost thoughts. His basic thesis is that our perception of the world and our ways of thinking about it are deeply influenced by the structure of the languages we speak. The writings collected in this volume include important papers on the Maya, Hopi, and Shawnee languages, as well as more general reflections on language and meaning. Whorf's ideas about the relation of language and thought have always appealed to a wide audience, but their reception in expert circles has alternated between dismissal and applause. Recently the language sciences have headed in directions that give Whorf's thinking a renewed relevance. Hence this new edition of Whorf's classic work is especially timely. The second edition includes all the writings from the first edition as well as John Carroll's original introduction, a new foreword by Stephen Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics that puts Whorf's work in historical and contemporary context, and new indexes. In addition, this edition offers Whorf's "Yale Report," an important work from Whorf's mature oeuvre.… (more)

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LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini

Whorf has been used, abused, lionized, trampled, resurrected, and the funny thing is it seems more like coincidence than anything else. It's a classic idea, linguistic relativism. Your language determines--shapes--influences--reflects--indicates--your worldview. An unavoidable idea, whatever you

think about it. Whorf's version is very reasonable, openhanded, suddenly extreme and absurd, and then okay again. He sees language as a cultural product, and cultures as radically different and amazing. He celebrates the human palimpsest, and in doing so exoticizes the other in all the ways with which we are very familiar. But underneath he's about bringing us together--he's a universalist, really, even a theosophist, who says look, the more worldviews (each different and amazing) we can apply to that golden something called meaning, by which he really means being (his relativity is based explicitly on Einstein's), the better we'll be able to see it for what it is. He thought a great transformation was coming, and he really really wanted to talk to people about it, and it makes him a lovably pathetic figure--this book traces his in his roles as amateur Mayan decryptographer, fire inspector (fire inspector! no wonder he wanted to dream of magic words), den mother for Sapir's crew of brilliant anth grads, respected authority, crackpot--and you see that he really just wanted to talk and have you listen and agree, and be as enthusiastic as he was, and he shaped his message to different audiences as a result. That's not so rare, and it's an understandable reason for a bit of inconsistency. I bet if he had put this book together himself he'd have left out all the Mayan stuff (it's irrelevant, and a man can have two books) and composed this as a paean to the richness and multiplicity of the human capacity to interpret the world, and these ideas would be at once less attacked and defended, more taken for granted. Who knows? Maybe even the theosophy.

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LibraryThing member MarthaJeanne

I was reading this in German and did not finish. Certainly this is a book that probably shouldn't be translated, but would need to be totally rewritten for the new language. The fact that it was even attempted, and that decades after the book was first published, shows the important place Whorf

holds in the history of linguistics.

Having said that in an attempt to be fair, I quit because of Wharf and not because of the translation. I am not interested in theosophism. If I want to learn Sanscrit terms I will do it in a book about Hinduism or yoga, and not as a few pages in the middle of a linguistic argument. Without wanting to reduce what we owe him, the points he taught are available in more modern, better written books.

Bottom line: If you need to read Wharf for historical reasons, do it in English. If you want to learn about language, read more recent books by his students.

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LibraryThing member mykl-s

The language we speak influences the way we think. That seems obvious now, and despite his critics, Whorf had some very good ideas.

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