biography
| name: |
Whorf, Benjamin Lee
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1897–1941)
|
| biography:
| Linguist and chemical engineer, born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, USA. He studied chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1918 BS), and began a lucrative lifelong career at the Hartford Fire Insurance Co (1919–41), where he specialized in fire hazards and prevention. In 1925 he renewed a childhood interest in Central America and travelled to Mexico (1930), and the next year he enrolled in Edward Sapir's American Indian linguistics course at Yale University. Through his work in comparative linguistics in studies of Hebrew, Mayan, Aztec, and Hopi languages and cultures, he developed the Whorf–Sapir hypothesis - that the grammatical structure of a language affects the culture of its speakers by conditioning the ways in which they think. |
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