Selected Writings Word And Language PDF Download

Excerpt from Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf Once in a blue moon a man comes along who grasps the relationship between events which have hitherto seemed quite separate, and gives mankind a new dimension of knowledge. Einstein, demonstrating the relativity of space and time, was such a man. In another field and on a less cosmic level, Benjamin Lee Whorf was one, to rank some day perhaps with such great social scientists as Franz Boas and William James. He grasped the relationship between human language and human thinking, how language indeed can shape our innermost thoughts. 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. Indo-European languages can be roughly calibrated - English, French; German, Russian, Latin, Greek, and the rest; but when it comes to Chinese, Maya, and Hopi, calibration, says Whorf, is structurally difficult if not impossible. Speakers of Chinese dissect nature and the universe differently from Western speakers. A still different dissection is made by various groups of American Indians, Africans, and the speakers of many other tongues. Whorf was a profound scholar in the comparatively new science of linguistics. One reason why he casts so long a shadow, I believe, is that he did not train for it. He trained for chemical engineering at M.I.T., and thus acquired a laboratory approach and frame of reference. The work in linguistics was literally wrung out of him. Some driving inner compulsion forced him to the study of words and language - not, if you please, the mastery of foreign languages, but the why and how of language, any language, and its competence as a vehicle for meaning. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.