Introduction

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) was trained as a chemical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked as a fire prevention engineer for the Hartford Insurance Company for his entire professional career. Avocationally, however, he pursued a wide variety of interests, centering for the most part on a deep concern for the apparent conflict between science and religion. This general interest eventually became focused on linguistic problems, and it is in the area of language-related studies that he made his most important scholarly contributions. (Biographical accounts of Whorf's life and his interests can be found in Carroll, 1956, and Rollins, 1972 and 1980. Whorf, 1956a, also contains a bibliography of most of Whorf's published and unpublished works.)

Whorf was initially self-taught in linguistics, but later (after 1931) benefited significantly from interaction with Sapir and his circle of students at nearby Yale. His interest in and formulation of the specifically linguistic relativity principle probably stemmed in large part from this contact with Sapir. It is important to realize that despite his “amateur” status, Whorf's work in linguistics was and still is recognized as being of superb professional quality by linguists. He produced general descriptive works on the modern Nahuatl (Aztec) and Hopi languages, partial descriptive studies of a variety of other languages contemporary and ancient, historical reconstructions of the Uto-Aztecan and adjacent language families, epigraphic studies of Mayan and central Mexican hieroglyphic writings, and a number of theoretical articles.