Benjamin Lee Whorf

Benjamin Lee Whorf was an American linguist who worked as a fire prevention engineer for an insurance company for most of his career, pursuing linguistics as an intensely serious avocation under Edward Sapir's guidance at Yale. His grammatical study of Hopi led him to argue that the language's structure encodes a fundamentally different treatment of time than the tensed grammar of European languages, a claim that became the most cited example of what he and Sapir together proposed as linguistic relativity, the idea that a language's grammar shapes how its speakers habitually construe reality. His essays were collected and published posthumously as Language, Thought, and Reality.