BENJAMIN LEE WHORF (1897-1941)

Benjamin Lee Whorf

John B. Carroll

The career of Benjamin Lee Whorf might, on the one hand, be de- scribed as that of a businessman of specialized talents—one of those individuals who by the application of out-of-the-ordinary training and knowledge together with devotion and insight can be so useful to any kind of business organization. On the other hand, his career could be described as that of an unusually competent and diligent research worker in several otherwise almost completely neglected fields of inquiry—the study of the lost writing system of the Mayas and the study of the languages of the Aztecs of Mexico and the Hopis of Arizona. Neither description, of itself, would mark him as a particularly engaging subject for biographical treatment. When it is realized, however, that he combined both these careers, achieving recognition in his business activities at the very same time that he advanced to high eminence in scholarly work—without even having undergone the usual preliminaries of formal academic study signal- ized by an advanced degree—and in addition injected into contem- porary discussions on the study of man and his culture a challenging set of hypotheses concerning the relation of language to thinking and cognition, his biography becomes a matter of more than passing interest.

He was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, on April 24, 1897, the son of Harry Church and Sarah Edna (Lee) Whorf. He was a scion of an old American stock, his ancestors having come from England to settle in Provincetown and other parts of the Bay Colony soon after the landing of the Pilgrims. In England, the Whorf name had been found most frequently in West Riding, in Yorkshire, and there may be some obscure connection with the name of the Wharfe River in that locality.

Benjamin was very much the child of his father, as were also his two younger brothers, each in his own way. Benjamin was the ‘ intellectual,’ the more bookish and idea-centered. John, born in 1903, became a well-known artist, particularly noted for his water- colors. Richard, born in 1906, has distinguished himself as an actor and director on the legitimate stage and in motion pictures.

Intellectual, artist, dramatist—the father was all three. After a brief career as a rather indifferent student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (it is said that he did not care to apply himself to his engineering studies), Harry Church Whorf drifted into commercial art, or what he liked to call ‘ designing,’ an occupation which drew upon his talents in draftsmanship as well as his fertile imagination. In this work he was very successful. Among his productions which survive even today is the chain of little Dutch girls which encircles each tin of a well-known brand of cleansing powder. He made himself a master of the then rapidly developing art of photolithog- raphy. But he was not content to remain within the confines of his occupation. He lent his artistic talents to numerous enterprises, stage designing being the foremost of these. He also wrote and directed plays for church groups and charitable organizations, and he wrote the libretto for Bobby Shaftoe, a musical comedy which was once given a performance in Boston. He enjoyed giving illustrated lectures on various subjects, and apparently had a knack of pleasing an audience. At the time of his death in 1934, he was at work on a manuscript concerning the Massachusetts littoral—its geology, history, fauna and flora, and so forth.

Even before the birth of their first child, Harry Whorf and his wife had taken up residence in a modest house in Winthrop, a residential suburb situated on a peninsula which flanks Boston harbor on the north. With the collections of drawings, books, manuscripts, chemicals, photographic equipment, and odds and ends which the father had accumulated, the house provided a stimulating environ- ment for three abnormally curious and inquisitive boys, all endowed with talents with which to take advantage of it. Like his brothers after him, Benjamin early acquired some considerable skill in drawing, but the chemicals, dyes, and photographic apparatus intrigued him most. He loved to perform such experiments as the one in which liquids of various colors are made to form different layers in a single vessel. It may have been his early experiences with chemicals which led Benjamin later to choose to study chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He went to the public schools of Winthrop, through the high school, where we are told he did well. We are further told that he developed his powers of concentration at this time—even to the extent of apparent absentmindedness. Once, on being sent to the cellar to fill the coal hod, he brought it, filled, all the way back to his room rather than to its place beside the kitchen stove. (Later in his life, friends occasionally complained that he passed them on the street without even a sign of recognition.) While not especially strong, he had sufficient confidence in his physical prowess to protect his younger brothers from neighborhood bullies. Particularly with John, who was six years his junior, he liked to play intellectual games. A favorite was the game of secret codes ; Benjamin could nearly always solve even the most complex ciphers his brother could devise. In the meantime, while alone, Benjamin read voraciously and amused himself with composing humorous verse.

After graduation from Winthrop High School in 1914, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, majoring in chemical engineering (Course X). His academic performance there appears to have been of only average quality ; his record shows no marks in the highest category (H, corresponding to what is now ordinarily called A), even in English composition or in French. This is, of course, a commentary on the precarious relationship which exists between performance rated in college and performance in later life. In the fall term of his senior year, a mysterious illness acquired in an ROTC summer camp forced Whorf to be absent from classes ; the necessity of making up deficiencies the following summer delayed his obtaining the degree of Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering until October 1918.

We do not know what sort of professional career Whorf planned for himself while a student at M.I.T. Most probably, he hoped to find employment as an engineer in some type of chemical production plant or factory. His professional career was to prove most unusual, for he emerged as a specialist in a line of work which, as he once complained in a letter to his M.I.T. alumni organization, was at the time hardly recognized as a distinct field of engineering even by his alma mater. In 1919, not long after his graduation from M.I.T., he was selected as a trainee in fire prevention engineering by the company which employed him for twenty-two years, up to the time of his death. According to an account prepared by C. S. Kremer, Chairman of the Board, Hartford Fire Insurance Company, ‘ he was selected by an officer of the company, Mr. F. C. Moore, who was himself an M.I.T. graduate and had charge of the underwriting and handling of the insurance on buildings equipped with automatic sprinklers.’ After graduating from the company school which Mr. Moore conducted for fire prevention engineers, Whorf was assigned to the home office of the company, in Hartford, to assist in fire prevention inspection of properties insured by the company in the northeastern part of the country. The company was starting to develop what was then a new idea in the business, namely, fire- prevention engineering inspections as a service to the property owner and policy holder. In this work, which necessitated constant travel, he became extremely skillful. ‘ In no time at all,’ writes Kremer, ‘ he became in my opinion as thorough and fast a fire prevention inspector as there ever has been. ... He was intensely practical and taught what he knew as facts to engineers and skillful men in various manufacturing businesses.’ He specialized more and more in the inspection of plants which utilized chemical processes in manufacturing.

On one occasion while inspecting a chemical plant he was refused admission to a certain building on the ground that it housed a secret process. Even the head of the plant, to whom he was referred, insisted that no outsider could inspect this building. Whorf said, ‘ You are making such-and-such a product? ‘ The answer was ‘ Yes,’ whereupon Whorf picked up a pad, quickly wrote down a chemical formula, and handed it to the head of the plant, saying, ‘ I think this is what you are doing.’ The surprised manufacturer replied, ‘How in the world did you know, Mr. Whorf?’, to which Whorf answered calmly, ‘ You couldn’t do it any other way.’ Needless to say, he was admitted to the building which contained the secret process.

He was so much respected among chemical manufacturers that his advice was eagerly sought. In an inspection of a very complicated chemical plant in Connecticut, he suggested to the management that a certain process be abandoned until it could be made safer, and indicated how this could be done. Some time later, after the sug- gested improvements had been made, the management delayed starting the process for several days until Whorf could return to the plant and approve going ahead.

He was admired not only for his technical skill but also, strange as it may seem to anyone who may know only Whorf’s linguistic work, for his ability to attract business for his company. He was once asked to make a fire prevention inspection of some public schools on which the company had only a trifling amount of business. The recommendations which he submitted so impressed the school board that they decided to appoint Whorf s company as the manager of their insurance account, quite to the surprise of the local agent, who had found this particular school board difficult to approach.

The value put on Whorf s services by his employer was signalized by his appointment in 1928 as Special Agent, and by his election in 1940 as Assistant Secretary of his company. It may have been that the company was proud of his accomplishments in linguistics and anthropology, and we know that it was liberal in granting him occasional leaves to carry on these activities,¹ but he was valued primarily for his actual services to his employer, which must have been of a high order, far beyond the ordinary. It is truly remarkable that he was able to achieve distinction in two entirely separate kinds of work. During certain periods of his life, his scholarly output was enough to equal that of many a full-time research professor ; yet he must have been at the same time spending eight hours every working day in his business pursuits. His friends often speculated on why he chose to remain in his occupation. Although several offers of academic or scholarly research positions were made to him during the latter years of his life, he consistently refused them, saying that his business situation afforded him a more comfortable living and a freer oppor- tunity to develop his intellectual interests in his own way.

As if his insurance work, his linguistic studies, and his extensive reading were not enough to occupy him, he found time for certain community activities, such as serving on a fire prevention committee of the Hartford Chamber of Commerce. From about 1928 on, he became increasingly popular as a lecturer before men’s clubs, historical societies, and the like.²

In 1920 he married Celia Inez Peckham, by whom he had three children, Raymond Ben, Robert Peckham, and Celia Lee. In some- what the same way that his father had done for him, he was able to arouse in his children, as if by magnetic induction, something like his delightful curiosity and his unhesitating imagination.

By his own account, Whorf did not become interested in linguistics until 1924, but one can trace a distinct succession of intellectual enthusiasms which led him to this. Even as a boy, along with his preoccupation with chemistry experiments, he was an avid reader. He became interested in Middle American prehistory through reading (several times, we are told) Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico. On one occasion his father was engaged in doing the stage designs for a play which he had written about a Maya princess, and in this connection assembled all manner df books about Maya archaeology. Young Ben was intrigued with the resulting display of stage designs, which doubtless portrayed ornate façades of Maya temples, and he may have begun to wonder about the meaning of Maya hieroglyphs. The interest in secret ciphers, mentioned earlier, may have reinforced this curiosity, but, if so, it lay dormant until a somewhat later period. Instead, he began to spend a good deal of time on a variety of seien- tifie topics. He became interested in botany, and learned the English and Latin names for thousands of plants and trees. (This was a lasting interest ; on his trip to Mexico in 1930 he took copious notes on Mexican flora, and as late as 1936 we find him filling several pages of one of his linguistic notebooks with a ‘ quiz ‘ on botanical termi- nology and curiosities.) As if to contrast with this, he was for a time intensely interested in astrology and amused himself with casting horoscopes for his friends. At some time in his adolescence he began to manifest what might seem an almost pathological graphomania, for at the age of 17 he began to keep a diary, a practice which he continued throughout his life. He contrived some sort of secret writing which he occasionally used to conceal some of the contents of his diaries, and which he also used to record his dreams in a series of ‘ dreambooks.’

Shortly after settling in Hartford, Whorf became increasingly concerned about the supposed conflict between science and religion. It seems that he had been deeply impressed by the fundamentalist shadings of his Methodist Episcopal religious background, which at times seemed to controvert the current doctrines in science. He became so deeply preoccupied with this issue that he wrote a 130,000- word manuscript on the subject, described as a book of religious philosophy in the form of a novel. This manuscript, completed in 1925, was submitted to several publishers and as promptly rejected by them, even over his protests. Another, briefer manuscript prepared about this time was entitled ‘ Why I have discarded evolution.’ An eminent geneticist to whom it was submitted for comment made a very courteous reply, starting with the admission that, although the manuscript at first appeared to be the work of a crank, its skill and perceptiveness soon marked it as otherwise, but continuing with a point-by-point rebuttal of Whorf’s arguments.

In the meantime, WhorPs reading led him to believe that the key to the apparent discrepancy between the Biblical and the scientific accounts of cosmogony and evolution might lie in a penetrating linguistic exegesis of the Old Testament. For this reason, in 1924 he turned his mind to the study of Hebrew.

It may come as a surprise to some that Whorf s interest in linguistics stemmed from one in religion. The reader may incidentally be reminded of the considerable connection which has long existed between linguistic and religious enterprises—the philological work represented in the Septuagint, in Ulfilas’s creation of the written Gothic into which he could translate the Bible, in the study of hun- dreds of non-European languages by missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in the thoroughly scientific investigations being carried out by contemporary linguistic missionaries, Whorf, however, was not interested in any translation of the Bible, at least not in any ordinary sense ; he seriously believed that fundamental human and philosophical problems could be solved by taking a new sounding of the semantics of the Bible. Whether this conviction was independently reached by him we do not know. We do know that sometime during 1924 there came to his attention a book which could have buttressed his beliefs, and which at any rate drew him closer to linguistics. He himself gives testimony of this in a hitherto unpublished paper which appears in the present collection. This book, hardly known to contemporary scholars, was by a French dramatist, philologist, and mystic of the early nineteenth century, Antoine Fabre dOlivet (1768-1825). It was entitled La langue hébraïque restituée, and was published in two volumes in Paris in 1815-16. Whorf most probably read an English translation of this scarce work published in 1921, for the name of the translator, Nayán Louise Redfield, appears in his notes.³

According to the Grand dictionnaire universel du XIX^e siècle, Fabre d’Olivet died י avec la reputation d’un fou ou d’un visionnaire.’ A rather indifferent dramatist, he retired in his later life to extensive philological lucubrations. In La langue hébraïque, his major work in this field, he attempted to show that the hidden meanings of the Book of Genesis could be elucidated by an analysis au fond of the structure of the triliteral Hebrew root. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, according to him, contained an inherent meaning ; for example, the letter Aleph was to him ‘ the sign of the power and stability of ideas, of unity and the principle which determines it.’ The letter Yodh was a sign of ‘ manifestation ‘; thus the partial root Aleph-Yodh ‘ designates,’ wrote Fabre d’Olivet, ‘ the center towards which the will tends, the place where it enfixes itself, the sphere of activity in which it operates.’ Since he concluded that the letter Tsadhe denoted ‘ termination,’ he was not surprised to find that the triliteral root Aleph-Yodh(or Waw)-Tsadhe meant ‘ any desire tending toward an end.’ The principle of the root-sign was applied to all parts of Hebrew grammar, and to the interpretation of several hundred Hebrew roots. The whole was offered as partly a linguistic study to illuminate the principles of language (he claimed having been hard put to choose whether Chinese, Sanskrit, or Hebrew would be the basis for his project), and partly as the fulfillment of his desire to discover the secret meaning of the cosmogony of Moses. In the English translation which Fabre d’Olivet himself obligingly provided, the first verse of the Bible comes out as follows: ‘At-FIRST-IN- PRINCIPLE, he-created, Ælohim (he caused to be, he brought forth in principle, HE-the-Gods, the-Being-of-Beings), the-selfsameness-of- heavens, and-the-selfsameness-of-earth.’ He tosses off the comment that this is not a mere result of some system he has established on the basis of ‘ more or less happy conjectures or probabilities,’ but ‘ the very language of Moses which I have interpreted according to its structural principles, which I have taken pains to develop to a satisfactory point.’

Despite the dubiety of Fabre d’Olivet’s startling results, his book seems to have made a strong impression on Whorf, who later charac- terized him as having been ‘ one of the most powerful linguistic intellects of any age.’ Whorf maintained that, while the Biblical exegesis attempted by Fabre d’Olivet could not be taken seriously, his ‘ root-sign ‘ was really a foreshadowing of what is nowadays called the phoneme. What intrigued Whorf was Fabre d’Olivet’s method. For example, in arriving at his ‘ meanings ‘ of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, Fabre d’Olivet had systematically compared and contrasted a wide variety of roots in which they occurred, much as one might attempt to obtain a ‘ meaning ‘ for the letter M in English by educing the common meaning in all English words beginning in M. We may permit ourselves to imagine that Fabre d’Olivet could have found a common element even in such opposite words as ‘ mother ‘ and ‘murder ‘! There are limits to which such a method can be pushed, which Fabre d’Olivet far exceeded ; never- theless, it remains true that such a technique of identifying isolates is in essence similar to the procedures of contemporary linguistics in identifying phonemes and morphemes. As we shall see, however, Whorfs methods in certain spheres of his work closely paralleled those of Fabre d’Olivet. This is illustrated in his early efforts to read Maya hieroglyphs, as well as in some of his unpublished work on the structure of Aztec. Another and perhaps a more profound way in which his methods resembled Fabre d’Olivet’s is represented in his always bold and penetrating search for inner meanings. Just as Fabre d’Olivet pushed imagination to the limit in looking for an underlying significance in a segment of a Hebrew root, so Whorf persisted in the struggle to wrest from the bare linguistic fact its ultimate purport.

The discovery of the work by Fabre d’Olivet stimulated Whorf to read more widely and deeply on the subject of language. He made use of the rich collections of the Watkinson Library, a scholarly research library in Hartford founded in 1857 under the provisions of the will of a wealthy English-born Hartford merchant who wanted the city to have a general library of reference. Visited chiefly by an occasional genealogist or art historian who sought access to its hundred-thousand-odd dusty volumes, the library was housed in the upper reaches of a fortress-like building known as the Wadsworth Atheneum, which also contained the Hartford Public Library and the collections of the Connecticut Historical Society.⁴ At least during the period that Whorf was in the habit of frequenting it after his business hours, its extreme stillness and bookish odor were conducive to deep concentration. Its first librarian had been James Hammond Trumbull, who was among other things a scholar in American Indian lore. During his service as librarian from 1863 to 1893, Trumbull had built up the library’s collections in American Indian ethnology, folklore, and language to an extent that would be considered unusual except for a large university library. This collection reawakened Whorfs interest in Mexican antiquities and lore, and directed his attention especially to the Aztec (Nahuatl) language and, later, to Maya hieroglyphs. Just what prompted Whorf to study Aztec, in particular, we do not know. Conceivably he chanced upon an account of Nahuatl which reminded him of the ideas he had found in La langue hébraïque. Be that as it may, Whorf began studying Aztec in 1926 ; he probably did not work seriously on Maya until 1928. He worked not only at the Watkinson Library, but also at any library he could profitably visit on his numerous business trips away from Hartford. He made rapid progress, and began corresponding with various scholars in Mexican archaeology and linguistics, including Herbert J. Spinden of the Brooklyn Museum and Alfred M. Tozzer of Harvard University. At Dr. Spinden’s suggestion he addressed himself to an attempt to work out a translation of a page of an old Mexican manuscript, a photographic reproduction of which was to be found in the Peabody Museum of Harvard University. The result was a paper read before the Twenty-Third International Congress of Americanists in Septem- ber 1928 and a corresponding first scholarly publication, ‘ An Aztec account of the period of the Toltec decline’ (1928),⁵ which shows an antiquarian’s interest in the details of Toltec history and chronology as well as a linguist’s pride in forcing a cranky Aztec word ‘ to yield up its secret,’ as Whorf himself put it. This paper, as read before the Congress, attracted a considerable amount of attention and publicity for the young insurance agent, who was hailed in newspaper reports for his having ‘ unlocked mysteries ‘ which had ‘ baffled י other scholars. About the same time there was completed another Aztec translation, published in 1929 under the title ‘ The reign of Huemac.’

These publications were, however, only the first and easy fruits of a period of study in which Whorf was also delving into comparative linguistics, presumably without any tutoring other than the necessarily brief contacts he may have had with such men as Spinden and Tozzer, and, in addition, J. Alden Mason of the University of Pennsylvania, whom he met during a visit to the first Linguistic Institute, held in the summer of 1928. At the International Congress of Americanists, Whorf had read another paper besides the one on Toltec history. It attracted much less attention, but was closer to his true interests ; entitled simply ‘ Aztec linguistics,’ it reported his assertion that Aztec was what he called an oligosynthetic language, that is, that all its words were built up out of a relatively few elements, perhaps as few as fifty basic monosyllabic roots, ‘ each conveying a general notion capable of wide modulation without loss of the basic sense ‘ (or so he wrote in the published abstract of the paper). On looking into whether the same roots he found in Aztec would show up also in languages related to Aztec, he was immediately gratified by the results. Toward the end of 1928 the work he had done on the familial relationships among Tepecano, Piman, and Aztec—all Mexican languages—appeared so promising to Tozzer and Spinden that they advised him to seek a research fellowship from the Social Science Research Council to enable him to obtain needed materials and work more intensively. Whorf countered with the proposal that he use such a fellowship to make a field trip to Mexico to locate old Aztec manuscripts for the Watkinson Library, one of the trustees of that library having expressed a desire to build up its collection of Aztec materials. Tozzer opined, however, that if he wanted to go to Mexico he would be better advised to investigate modern Nahuatl, a suggestion to which Whorf readily assented. In a letter to Mason dated December 6, 1928, Whorf commented, in reference to the fellowship for which he was applying, ‘It is a question whether I get it, because these Fellowships are supposed to be for men with Ph.D. degrees, and while they sometimes make exceptions, these exceptions are rare and hard to get, requiring very good recommendations.’ His application to the Social Science Research Council was accom- panied, first, by a general statement of his scholarly plans, and second, by a nearly completed article entitled ‘ Notes on the oligosynthetic comparison of Nahuatl and Piman, with special reference to Tepecano.’ In the first of these documents, Whorf revealed himself as avowedly visionary, but he may have felt its content necessary to win the interest of the committee which reviewed his fellowship application :

With the aid of this Research Fellowship if possible I plan to do and publish sufficient work on Mexican linguistics to make the principle of oligosynthesis a live topic and to interest other investigators in the basic substratum of language to which it belongs.

After I have become better known in this way the next step will be to arouse interest in the phenomenon that I call BINARY GROUPING in Hebrew and the Semitic languages. I am of course still working on this and will continue right along to bring it to the attention of Semitic researchers.

After binary grouping has also become a live topic I will begin to make a union between this principle and that of oligosynthesis and thereby reach the still deeper principle underlying the Hebrew and Semitic languages.

The next step will be to use these principles in working out the primitive underlying basis of all speech behavior. This will amount to laying the foundations of a new science, and although this consummation lies some little time in the future I feel that it is quite distinctly in sight. Still further ahead are the possible applications of such a science restoring a possible original common language of the human race or in perfecting an ideal natural tongue constructed of the original psychological significance of sounds, perhaps a future common speech into which all our varied languages may be assimilated, or, putting it differently, to whose terms they may all be reduced. This may seem at the present time very visionary, but it would be no more remarkable than what science has already done in other fields when it has got hold of sound principles to point the way, and I believe my work is tending to unfold such principles. And with the ultimate development of these researches will come manifestation of the deeper psychological, symbolic, and philosophical sense contained in the cosmology of the Bible, the starting point and original inspiration of these studies.

Oligosynthesis is explained further in the first few paragraphs of the second document which accompanied Whorfs fellowship application :

Oligosynthesis is a name for that type of language structure in which all or nearly all of the vocabulary may be reduced to a very small number of roots or significant elements, irrespective of whether these roots or elements are to be regarded as original, standing anterior to the language as we know it, or as never having had independent existence, theirs being an implicit existence as parts in words that were always undissociated wholes.

Such a structure was recognized by the writer in the Nahuatl or Aztec language of Mexico, in which he has made numerous studies and the term oligosynthesis was thereupon proposed by him Briefly, the conclusions are that nearly all and probably quite all the present known native vocabulary of Nahuatl is derived from the varied combination and varied semantic development of NO MORE THAN THIRTY-FIVE ROOTS, for which the writer prefers the name of ‘ elements,’ each of which elements stands for a certain general idea, including something of the surrounding field of related ideas into which this central idea insensibly shades off. These thirty-five elements (it now begins to seem very unlikely that their number will be increased) have been obtained by extensive stem-analysis and are listed ... in the appendix of the present article. They explain the meaning of thousands of Nahuatl words, including great numbers of words learned recently, which have had the meaning that would be expected from their elements. Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly evident to me that these elements are to be regarded as original roots anterior and ancestral to the present language, and my previous view that they might be the result of assimilative back-formation is becoming less and less of a serious claimant for consideration. Obviously we have here a structure, a point-to-point correspondence between the path of ideation and the successions of lip, tongue, and glottal activities (i.e. consonants and vowels) that may be of great linguistic, glottogonie, and psychological significance.

Binary grouping referred to a principle which Whorf believed to inhere in the structure of Hebrew roots, as may be seen in the following quotation from an unpublished manuscript : ‘ A binary group is a group of Semitic roots having in common a certain sequence of two consonants, containing all the roots with this sequence in one language, and having these roots with but few excep- tions allocated to a FEW CERTAIN KINDS OF MEANING.’

These quotations are of special interest when viewed in the light of Whorf s early enthusiasm for Fabre d’Olivet. As a further note, it should be added that Whorf started to extend the application of the oligosynthetic principle to his first work with Maya, concerning which he read a paper before the Linguistic Society of America (of which he had just become a member) in December 1929, ‘ Stem series in Maya.’ In the abstract of this paper submitted to the program committee of the Linguistic Society, we find Whorf pointing out that the majority of Maya stems beginning QE- bear the meaning ‘turn.’ He writes further : ‘ So other series, e.g. QI-, radiate, glow, burn, scatter ; QO-, QU-, inward ; Bí-, move ; TA-, connect ; TZA-, come or bring together ; MA-, pass. In other words, “ideology follows phoneticism.” ‘

The response of the SSRC to his application for a research fellow- ship being favorable, Whorf set about making arrangements for his field trip to Mexico. He obtained a few weeks’ leave from his company and left for Mexico City with Mrs. Whorf and her mother in January 1930. En route he spent a few days researching in the library of the Department of Middle American Research at Tulane University of Louisiana. On arrival in Mexico City, he sought the assistance of several Mexican specialists in Aztec, especially Professor Mariano Rojas of the National Museum of Mexico. Partly with their aid, he gained access to several excellent informants who spoke a form of Aztec which was believed to approximate, as closely as one could expect over the years, the classical dialect of Aztec once spoken in Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) at the time of Montezuma. These individuals lived in an outlying suburb in the Federal District, known as Milpa Alta, and it is their dialect of which Whorf made a detailed linguistic analysis, published posthumously in 1946 in Hoijer’s Linguistic structures of native America. In the meantime, Whorf poked around the Mexican countryside in search of suggestive archaeological material. In a ruined temple overlooking the village of Tepoztlan, where he conducted further linguistic studies, he came upon, apparently quite by chance, a band of sculptured figures which had previously escaped the close attention of scholars. His sharp observation and close familiarity with both Aztec and Maya graphic art enabled him to recognize almost immediately that these figures deviated from their usual forms as ‘ day signs ‘ of the Aztec calendar and showed certain resemblances to Mayan characters. This discovery of ‘ a definite, clearly demonstrable rapport between Nahuatl hieroglyphs and early Maya ones,’ as Whorf regarded it, was the basis of one of the papers reprinted in the present collection, ‘ A central Mexican inscription combining Mexican and Maya day signs.’ It furnishes an excellent example of Whorf s methods of work, and is also his earliest publication pointing towards his later researches into Maya hieroglyphs.

For several years after his return from Mexico, Whorf occupied himself with working up the data amassed during the Mexican sojourn. Not only was it necessary to sketch out the linguistic analysis of the Milpa Alta Nahuatl ; it was also urgent to follow up the leads, provided by the discoveries concerning Mexican and Maya day signs, which had had the effect of confirming or modifying certain hunches he had developed previously. A major series of publications concerning Maya hieroglyphs started about this time, first with a monograph published by the Peabody Museum of Har- vard, י The phonetic value of certain characters in Maya writing ‘ (1933) and later with an article, ‘ Maya writing and its decipherment ‘ (1935). In the earlier publication, which Professor Tozzer of Harvard urged him to prepare, he set forth in detail and with his evidence his thesis that Maya writing was at least partly phonetic, and he offered a specimen translation of a simple Maya text from one of the codices. Since the hypothesis of phoneticism in Maya writing had been all but abandoned by Maya scholars at least fifty years previ- ously, Whorf’s materials must have been exceedingly impressive, at least at the time, to have gotten published at all. The later publi- cation, ‘ Maya writing and its decipherment,’ was a reply to a critique published by Richard C. E. Long in the journal Maya Research. Besides taking issue with many points of detail raised by Mr. Long, Whorf attempted to explain why he regarded Long’s approach as fundamentally mistaken ; he also offered another specimen translation of a Maya text. In this article, furthermore, he mentioned that he had been working on a manuscript, ‘ First steps in the decipherment of Maya writing,’ which he then hoped to publish within a short time. This manuscript, found among Whorf’s papers, has thus far remained unfinished and unpublished, though some parts of it are reflected in a paper which Whorf read before a scientific congress in 1940 and which is reprinted in the present collection, ‘ Decipherment of the linguistic portion of the Maya hieroglyphs.’ Whorf was bitterly disappointed by the rather cool reception generally accorded his work by Maya scholars after 1933 ; he was entirely confident that his linguistic approach held the key to the inter- pretation of Maya hieroglyphs. The paper he read in 1940 was apparently a last-ditch effort to win support for his approach.

Up to the time of the Mexican trip, Whorf seems to have had very little contact, either face-to-face or by correspondence, with any of the persons who were later to be his close colleagues in the field of linguistics. His scholarly relations had been chiefly with a group of specialists in Mexican archaeology, none of whom were particularly well qualified in, or concerned with, general linguistics. In view of this, the competence that Whorf had achieved in general linguistics and linguistic field methods, purely on the strength of his own untutored study, was remarkable. Nevertheless, his talents might never have fully matured if he had not eventually met Edward Sapir (1884-1939), a foremost authority not only on American Indian languages but also on the general science of language. Whorf had, of course, been aware of Sapir’s work, and he had doubtless read Sapir’s book Language (New York, 1921) with intense interest. He first met Sapir, though only briefly, at the September 1928 Inter- national Congress of Americanists, and talked with him further at subsequent meetings of scientific societies in 1929 and 1930. He could not, however, make any close contact with Sapir until the latter came from the University of Chicago in the fall of 1931 to take his post at Yale as Professor of Anthropology to teach linguis- tics. Whorf lost no time in enrolling in Sapir’s first course at Yale in American Indian linguistics ; among the Whorf papers can be found a manuscript, entitled ‘ The structure of the Athabaskan languages,’ a term paper which Sapir awarded a grade of A and much praise. Although Whorf nominally enrolled for a program of studies leading to the doctorate, he never sought or obtained any higher degree ; he pursued his studies for pure intellectual ends. The effects of Whorf’s first formal studies in linguistics were notice- able and demonstrable. His early interests in ‘ oligosynthesis,’ ‘ binary grouping,’ and other unusual linguistic theories became tempered at least to the extent that he was brought to see them in the light of the accumulated experience of men like Sapir. (I can find no mention of the idea of oligosynthesis, as such, in any of Whorfs writings after 1931.) More important, Whorf was put in close touch with the linguistic theories and techniques which were most advanced at that time, as well as with the problems which were currently considered the most essential to solve. Finally, his studies at Yale brought him into contact with a small but earnest band of Sapir’s students, including such individuals as Morris Swadesh, Stanley Newman, George Trager, Charles Voegelin, Mary Haas, and Walter Dyk, all of whom have since made important con- tributions to linguistics or anthropology. In 1937-38, Whorf was a Lecturer in Anthropology at Yale.

Whorf’s association with Sapir thus served to intensify his desire to develop further the field of American Indian linguistics. In the monograph about Maya hieroglyphs published in 1933, we find Whorf crediting Sapir with certain suggestions about the inter- pretation of the zero sign. Sapir was probably more influential, however, in encouraging Whorf to expand his work on the Uto- Aztecan languages (a large stock of languages whose relationships Sapir had established), in particular to take up the study of the Hopi language, a distant relative of Aztec. In December 1932 Whorf read a paper entitled ‘ The characteristics of the Uto-Aztecan stock ’ at the meeting of the Linguistic Society of America held at New Haven. His further work on Uto-Aztecan linguistics (exclusive of Hopi) is represented by a review (1935) of Kroeber’s Uto-Aztecan languages of Mexico, and several articles, ‘ The comparative linguistics of Uto-Aztecan ‘ (1935), ‘ The origin of Aztec TL ‘ (1937), and (with G. L. Trager) ‘ The relationship of Uto-Aztecan and Tanoan ‘ (1937). In these articles, Whorf recognized a superfamily language stock which he proposed to call Macro-Penutian, to include Penutian, Uto-Aztecan, Mayan, and Mixe-Zoque-Huave. Later, he used this structuring in preparing a revision of Sapir’s classification of American Indian languages.

In linguistic work as such, Whorf was best known for his studies of Hopi. Perhaps through the good offices of Sapir, he made contact with a native speaker of Hopi, who then lived, conveniently enough, in New York City. Beginning in the spring of 1932 and with the support of a small research subvention obtained for him by Sapir, Whorf worked intensely on developing a linguistic analysis of Hopi, utilizing field research methods in which he had received instruction from Sapir. Whorf and his informant exchanged visits in New York and Wethersfield (where Whorf resided) ; in 1938 Whorf was able to spend a short time on the Hopi reservation in Arizona. By 1935 he had prepared a tentative grammar and dictionary of Hopi. Except for the brief sketch of Hopi grammar in Hoijer’s Linguistic structures of native America (1946)—a sketch prepared by Whorf in late 1939—the major outcomes of these studies remain unpublished. Nevertheless, one can be grateful for the two brief but very influential technical articles about Hopi which Whorf published during his lifetime : ‘ The punctual and segmentative aspects of verbs in Hopi ‘ (published in 1936, first read as a paper before the Linguistic Society of America in December 1935), and ‘ Some verbal categories of Hopi ‘ (1938). In these papers one can see how their author was beginning to be fired with the notion, developed more extensively in later popularized papers, that the strange grammar of Hopi might betoken a different mode of perceiving and conceiving things on the part of the native speaker of Hopi. In the first, he asserted that ‘ the Hopi actually have a language better equipped to deal with . . . vibratile phenomena than is our latest scientific terminology/ This was followed by ‘ An American Indian model of the universe ‘ (probably written in 1936 but not published until 1950), which explores the implications of the Hopi verb system with regard to the Hopi conception of space and time. The work with Hopi must have also influenced the writing, about this time, of the paper entitled ‘ A linguistic consideration of thinking in primitive communities ‘ (published in the present collection for the first time). ‘ Some verbal categories of Hopi ‘ (1938) discusses several interesting distinctions which Hopi makes between kinds and modes of happening which English treats as the same, and ‘ Linguistic factors in the terminology of Hopi architecture ‘ (written in early 1940 and not published until 1953) contains the thesis that the Hopi mind automatically separates the ‘ occupancy ‘ or spot of ground or floor on which the occupancy occurs from the use to which the occupancy is put, whereas the speaker of English tends to merge these, as where ‘ school י is thought of as both an institution and a building. (Indeed, do we not almost instinctively feel that an institution must of necessity be housed in some kind of building ?) Whorf is probably best known for the article ‘ The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language,’ written in 1939, and for the three articles which were published in 1940 and 1941 in the Technology Review—all based to a considerable extent upon his research in Hopi. What is important to note is that, first, these latter papers were grounded upon a solid founda- tion of linguistic analysis done much earlier, and, second, that the ideas of linguistic relativity expressed therein were by no means new in Whorf’s mind ; on the contrary, the seeds of these ideas were already apparent in materials prepared as early as 1935, if not earlier.

The three articles written for the Technology Review of M.I.T. and the article entitled ‘ Language, mind, and reality ‘ and published in an Indian journal of theosophy were addressed to lay audiences. Undoubtedly Whorf had it in mind to bring linguistics before the general public in a manner that had scarcely ever been attempted ; in fact, he may be credited with being the first popularizer of modern linguistic science. He realized, however, that it would be impossible to popularize linguistics, and there would be little purpose in doing so, unless linguistics held a message of popular appeal. This message, Whorf believed, was that linguistics has much to say about how and what we think.

It may be of interest to recount what led to the writing of the articles for the Technology Review. As early as 1932 there was an exchange of correspondence between Whorf and the editor of the Technology Review, J. R. Killian, Jr. (now president of M.I.T.), to whose attention Whorf’s article on the Mexican day signs had come. Killian invited Whorf to write an account of his trip to Mexico, and asked whether he had unearthed any material relating to ‘ the history of engineering, architecture, and the practical sciences.’ Almost disdainfully Whorf replied that this trip had ‘ no bearing on engineer- ing, architecture, or the practical sciences ‘—that ‘ the investigation was conducted thoroughly in the spirit of scientific research, but it was in the social sciences, not the physical sciences.’ Nevertheless, he did eventually agree to prepare an article on his trip, but for some reason such an article does not seem to have been written. The next exchange was between Whorf and President Karl T. Compton, in late 1939. Whorf initiated this correspondence as a result of ‘ a slight difficulty ‘ he had had in filling out some sort of questionnaire sent him by the Register of Former Students—namely, that the questionnaire omitted any mention of insurance, insurance engineer- ing, fire prevention, or the like, fields which Whorf felt ought to receive recognition as engineering professions. He wanted to bring this apparent omission to President Compton’s attention, and proceeded to describe in detail the nature of his own work. In this same letter, he took occasion to mention other activities of his which did not quite fit the list of rubrics on the questionnaire, to wit, his research on American Indian languages. President Compton’s reply, after explaining that the apparent omission on the question- naire form was the result of abbreviation rather than deliberate exclusion, expressed interest in WhorFs avocational work and asked permission to submit his letter for publication in the Technology Review. Permission was granted, and the letter (in much condensed form) is to be seen in the January 1940 issue of the Review. In the course of ensuing correspondence, the editor of the Review, then F. G. Fassett, Jr., wrote Whorf on November 14, 1939 : ‘ Your linguistic studies offer a very interesting and provocative possibility to anyone responsible for a magazine. “Inasmuch as the analysis of reality is a matter of language, and the relativity of such analyses can only be appreciated through studies that show the immense range of possible diversity in linguistic expression it will be seen that there is a connection here with the attempts of science to understand the universe and man ’՚—I think it would be very interesting to see the ideas implicit in this statement from your October letter expanded in an article aimed at the Review group. Is this prospect of interest ? ‘ Evidently it was, for Whorf was able to submit the first article, ‘ Science and linguistics,’ as early as January 30, 1940, and it was printed in the Review shortly thereafter. The exceedingly warm reception this article got, both from regular readers of the Review and from the recipients of reprints, pointed to the desirability of further articles. The second article, ‘ Linguistics as an exact science,’ was submitted on September 16, 1940, and the third and last, ‘ Lan- guages and logic,’ on February 14, 1941, at a time when Whorf’s health was failing and his physical weakness was already apparent in his handwriting.

Even in the year when he was writing these brilliant articles on linguistics and at the same time fighting off ill health, Whorf became consumed with still another interest. On account of a lecture which his oldest son attended and described to him, Whorf became acquainted with Fritz Kunz, a well-known speaker and writer, at present the executive vice-president of the Foundation for Integrated Education, Inc. Kunz and Whorf had many common interests, especially (as Mr. Kunz has written me) in the philosophy and meta- physics of India, and it was this that brought them to work together quite closely. One result of this friendship was Kunz’s suggestion that Whorf write an article about linguistics for a theosophical journal published at Madras, India ; the article entitled ‘ Language, mind, and reality ‘ was the result. Kunz was on the point of founding a new journal, Main Currents in Modern Thought, and Whorf was of great help in putting out the first few issues, in late 1940 and early 1941. The journal (still published today, but in a different format) was of an interesting and unusual character ; it was intended as a clearing house of ideas and information in all sorts of fields in natural science, social science, the humanities, mathematics, logic, and philosophy ; it was to be written chiefly by its subscribers. Published in those days in mimeographed form, the varied colors of its pages were keyed to subject matter. Whorf wrote literally dozens of pages in the first volume, doing highly creative book reviews and contributing little abstracts on such diverse subjects as ‘ The Hurrians of old Chaldea,’ ‘ Shrinking glass,’ and ‘ Notes on the demonstration of “wetter” water.’ One of his reviews is based on two books on the economics of primitive societies, and is provocatively titled ‘ We may end the war that is within all wars that are waged to end all war.’ ‘ These books,’ Whorf wrote, ‘ are outstanding examples of a type of investigation that is gradually unsettling the old-style materialistic theory of economics. And since both Marxian com- munism and private capitalism are based on a stereotyped material- istic formulation of economics, such irrefutable scientific expositions of the fact that economic behavior is conditioned by culture, not by mechanistic reactions, may be the forerunner of a NEW ERA.’ This quotation is only one of many that could be cited to show WhorPs broad humanism and concern for the commonweal. Nor did Whorf neglect to bring the implications of linguistics to the attention of readers of Main Currents. Reporting several interesting facts which had appealed to his interest at a scientific meeting, he wrote, in a piece entitled ‘ A brotherhood of thought ‘ :

There is no word for ‘ word ‘ in Chinese. The nearest thing is the element tsz, which is translated ‘ word ‘ but means rather ‘ syllable ‘ or ‘ syllabic element.’ Many such elements never occur free but only in a few combinations, like the ‘ pyr- ‘ in ‘ pyrometer.’ Words in the sense of vocabulary units exist as either of one or two syllables, a fact obscured by the traditional Chinese system of writing, which keeps every syllable separate. This was pointed out by Dr. Y. R. Chao of Yale in a paper ‘ Word conceptions in Chinese ‘ at the meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Providence, R.I., 12/30/40. The nature of Chinese gram- mar is only just beginning to be understood ; Dr. Chao and others have exploded the idea that Chinese is a monosyllabic language. At the same meeting Dr. G. A. Kennedy of Yale, analyzing ‘ Complex attributive expressions in Chinese,’ showed that Chinese has no relative clauses, and that a different kind of order-system rules the logic of such relationships. If the element te used in this logic be translated ‘ -ish,’ then ‘ The House that Jack Built ‘ would go in Chinese : ‘ This is Jack-ish build-ish house ; this is Jack-ish build-ish house-ish in-ish lie-ish malt,’ etc.

It is not sufficiently realized that the ideal of worldwide fraternity and cooperation fails if it does not include ability to adjust intellectually as well as emotionally to our brethren of other countries. The West has attained some emotional understanding of the East through the esthetic and belles-lettres type of approach, but this has not bridged the intellectual gulf ; we are no nearer to understanding the types of logical thinking which are reflected in truly Eastern forms of scientific thought or analysis of nature. This requires linguistic research into the logics of native languages, and realization that they have equal scientific validity with our own thinking habits.

After a long and lingering illness, during which he valiantly struggled to keep up his study and his writing, Whorf succumbed on July 26, 1941, at the age of 44. He had accomplished more than he knew, yet only a small part of what he might have done. His passing was taken notice of by editorial obituaries not only in the local newspapers but also in such papers as the New York Times, and later, of course, in several scholarly journals.

I cannot close this biographical memoir without a few remarks about Whorfs personality and habits of work. Above all he was capable of extremely deep and steadfast concentration in everything he did. Nothing was treated lightly or carelessly. His penciled manuscripts, in beautifully neat and always legible handwriting, exemplify his meticulousness ; it is also exceedingly rare to find an error in his typescripts (he nearly always did his own typing of scholarly manuscripts and correspondence). He was willing to work almost endlessly ; his published writings represent but a small fraction of the manuscript material he produced, and his notebooks are truly voluminous. Without hesitation, he would if necessary go to the trouble of copying out, in longhand or script printing, page after page of detailed linguistic texts. In writing, he was able to express himself artistically, convincingly, and effortlessly ; in many cases, his first draft—with a minimum of emendations—was final. Yet, he nearly always made a pencil draft preparatory to typing, even for correspondence. This tireless devotion to scholarship undoubtedly took its toll of Whorfs strength and health, although he never appeared visibly fatigued. He habitually worked late into the night, relaxing himself only by taking short catnaps or by playing a few rolls of classical music on his mechanical grand piano. He was somewhat casual about his hours at the office, being dilatory in both arrival and departure on many occasions, but he accomplished much while there. For exercise, he enjoyed walking, often making the four- or five-mile trip from his office to his home in Wethersfield on foot, with perhaps a stop at the Watkinson Library en route.

Social life held little significance for him except when it involved his linguistic colleagues, to whom he was always a delight. He main- tained an air of cheerful curiosity, and continually had interesting and novel things to say. As I have recalled elsewhere, ‘ Whorf was a quiet, contemplative teacher ; he would not stop at remaining silent for a seemingly interminable time while searching his mind to recall some- thing or to think through a problem. Yet, when he became prompted to tell me of some new insight he had reached, the smoothness and lucidity of his remarks were little short of awesome. His mode of behavior was that of neither the scholar nor the businessman—he gave only the impression of calm, unhurried, effortless inspiration. Self-seeking was entirely alien to him and it is a tribute to him that he was so generous in sharing his remarkable perspectives with others.’

Source : John B. Carroll, Part I of the ‘ Introduction,’ to Language, Thought and Reality. Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (Massachusetts, 1956), pp. 1-23. By permission of the M.I.T. Press, and the author.

¹ Nevertheless, Whorf often combined business with science on these trips. In the course of the field trip to Mexico in 1930, he inspected the Mexico City agency of the company and wrote a comprehensive report of his findings and recommendations.

² My own acquaintance with Whorf developed as a consequence of my attending a lecture he gave at the Children’s Museum of Hartford, December 1, 1929. The title of the lecture, announced as a ‘ chalk talk ‘, was ‘ The Aztec and Maya Indians of Mexico.’

³ Miss Redfield, for some years a resident of Hartford, also translated several other works by Fabre d’Olivet.

⁴ In 1952 the Watkinson Library was removed to spacious and modern quarters at Trinity College in Hartford.

⁵ See the bibliography of Whorf’s writings, pp. 271-276 [in the source] ; this is followed by a short list of related writings to which references are made.