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Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

After Whorf's death, his close friend Trager was appointed as the curator for his unpublished manuscripts. While Whorf had worked on many theories and areas of linguistics, his name is most commonly attached to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Whorf had published his own observations on how linguistic differences have consequences in human cognition and behavior, separate from Sapir. Harry Hoijer actually created the term "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis", even though Sapir and Whorf never put forth any such hypothesis or even worked together to formulate the ideas apart from the teacher-student relationship. Whorf referred to this concept himself as linguistic relativity.

Trager and Hoijer published many of the works and worked hard to popularize Whorf's ideas about linguistic relativity. These ideas focused extensively on the way a person views and interprets the world based upon their language structure and therefore, also shaped the world according to their language. From his Science and Linguistics (1940):

"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data that the agreement decrees. We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated."

Hopi

Whorf's work with the Hopi language was an example of linguistic relatively. It also became the most discussed and criticized example. While Whorf claimed that the Hopi language used a different method of viewing time, linguist Ekkehart Malotki tried to prove this incorrect by giving numerous examples how the Hopi language refers to time. He stated that while the the Hopi language system of tenses was composed of a future and non-future, manifesting and manifested in Whorf's terminology, the only significant difference between the Hopi system the three-tense system of European languages was that Hopi combined the past and present into a single category.

Many viewed this analysis as proof that Whorf's ideas and his concept of linguistic relativity were false. However, others defended Whorf, arguing that Whorf wasn't claiming that Hopi lacked words or categories to describe time, but that the Hopi concept of time is altogether different from that of English speakers. Whorf had also described a group of stems which he called tensors which described aspects of temporality, but did so without referring to countable units of time.

Allophones

Hopi woman dressing hair of unmarried girl

Whorf had also introduced the concept of the allophone, which is a word that describes positional phonetic variants of a single superordinate phoneme. This was also promoted by Trager and Bernard Bloch and subsequently became a standard part of linguistic structuralism. Whorf viewed allophones as another example of linguistic relativity because they describes how acoustically different sounds can be treated as reflections of a single phoneme in a language. Through this, the different sounds might appear similar to native speakers of a language. Whorf described them as "Objectively, acoustically, and physiologically the allophones of [a] phoneme may be extremely unlike, hence the impossibility of determining what is what. You always have to keep the observer in the picture. What linguistic pattern makes like is like, and what it makes unlike is unlike".

Uto-Aztecan languages

Sapir was the first to conclusively show the Uto-Aztecan as a valid language family and Whorf had worked extensively in the languages of it while in Mexico. Among his published works were Notes on the Tübatulabal language, The Comparative Linguistics of Uto-Aztecan, and a review of Kroeber's survey of Uto-Aztecan linguistics. His grammar sketch of the Milpa Alta dialect of Nahuatl, as was mentioned earlier, was not published until after his death. It was used as a basic description of modern Nahuatl, and is still considered to be technically advanced.

Part of his legacy in the In Uto-Aztecan languages is the discovery of the reason that the Nahuatl language has the phoneme [tɫ], which is not found in the other languages of the family. It had puzzled other linguists, even Sapir. Whorf published a paper in the journal of American Anthropologists in 1937 which claimed that the phoneme was a result of some of the Nahuan or Aztecan languages having undergone a sound change from the original /*t/ to [tɫ] in the position before */a/. This became known as "Whorf's law", although a more detailed understanding of way this occurred has since been developed.

Mayan

Plaster cast of Seibal, Stela 10, a Mayan artifact from Seibal, Guatemala

Remember that Whorf's earliest experience with linguistics was his study of Hebrew and Mayan. Whorf said that Mayan writing was, to an extent, phonetic, but the main authority on the Ancient Mayan culture, J.E.S Thompson rejected this notion, claiming that Mayan writing lacked any kind of phonetic component and thus couldn't be deciphered using linguistic analysis. Whorf argued back that it was the very refusal to approach it that way was what was was holding back the work on deciphering it. While Mayan writing turned out to be logo-syllabic and was deciphered in the 1950s by Yuri Knorozov, it was Whorf's idea of its phonetic nature that helped Knorozov make the breakthrough.

While Whorf never sought a degree in linguistics, his studies and publications in several areas of the field have contributed greatly to an understanding of how language worked. He may have died before many of his theories could be published or proven, but they have earned him a position among the most prominent of linguists.