Benjamin Lee Whorf quotes

Benjamin Lee Whorf was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer, most famous for his ideas about how language shapes thought. His research led to the development of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that language influences perception and cognition. He became a significant figure in linguistics, inspiring debate and further study on the relationship between language and reality. Here are 13 of his quotes:

Speech is the best show a man puts on.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

But in due course it became evident that not only a physical situation qua physics, but the meaning of that situation to people, was sometimes a factor, through the behavior of people, in the start of a fire.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it that we have is thrown by the study of language. This study shows that the forms of a person's thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language--shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family. His thinking itself is in a language-in English, in Sanskrit, in Chinese. And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

It needs but half an eye to see in these latter days that science, the Grand Revelator of modern Western culture, has reached, without having intended to, a frontier. Either it must bury its dead, close its ranks, and go forward into a landscape of increasing strangeness, replete with things shocking to a culture-trammeled understanding, or it must become, in Claude Houghton's expressive phrase, the plagiarist of its own past. The frontier was foreseen in principle very long ago, and given a name that has descended to our day clouded with myth. That name is Babel. For science's long and heroic effort to be strictly factual has at last brought it into entanglement with the unsuspected facts of the linguistic order. These facts the older classical science had never admitted, confronted, or understood as facts. Instead they had entered its house by the back door and had been taken for the substance of Reason itself.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

My analysis was directed toward purely physical conditions, such as defective wiring, presence of lack of air spaces between metal flues and woodwork, etc., and the results were presented in these terms.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

At the same time, new concepts and abstractions flow into the picture, taking up the task of describing the universe without reference to such time or space - abstractions for which our language lacks adequate terms.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages. The verb tunatya contains in its idea of hope something of our words 'thought,' 'desire,' and 'cause,' which sometimes must be used to translate it.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Too long has the public mind considered religion to be synonymous with priestcraft.

Benjamin Lee Whorf