Linguistic relativity: Benjamin Lee Whorf and the return of the repressed

Critical Quarterly

Volumn 41, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 153-156

  Cameron, Deborah ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF STRATHCLYDE   (United Kingdom)

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Indexed keywords

EID: 34248756378     PISSN: 00111562     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8705.00236     Document Type: Article

References (2)

1. Whorf died in 1941. Born in 1897, he had begun publishing in the late 1920s, but his ideas about linguistic relativity became more widely known when his papers were collected posthumously in 1956 (see B. L. Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality, ed. J. B. Carroll, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1956).
2. Here I am summarising an argument made by Geoff Pullum, who first sets out to explode the myth that Eskimos have a lot of words for snow, then goes on to argue that even if they did it would hardly signify. Pullum's argument is repeated by Steven Pinker in his popular text The Language Instinct, which includes a lengthy section taking issue with Whorf. (See Geoff Pullum, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1991.)