Benjamin Lee Whorf citations

Benjamin Lee Whorf est un linguiste et anthropologue américain qui s'intéressa particulièrement aux langues amérindiennes. Il est l'auteur avec Edward Sapir de l'hypothèse de Sapir-Whorf pour laquelle il est principalement connu.

Benjamin L. Whorf fut un linguiste atypique, se tenant volontairement à l'écart du monde universitaire : il enseigna peu et refusa tous les postes en université qui lui furent proposés à la fin de sa vie. Son métier d'ingénieur dans une compagnie d'assurances ne le prédisposait pourtant pas à se distinguer dans les sphères académiques. Mais il revendiqua toujours son indépendance comme un gage de liberté lui permettant de développer des idées originales, encore aujourd'hui objets de vives polémiques,. Wikipedia

✵ 24. avril 1897 – 26. juillet 1941

Benjamin Lee Whorf: 8 citations0 J'aime

Benjamin Lee Whorf: Citations en anglais

“Speech is the best show a man puts on.”

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Benjamin Lee Whorf

Source: Language, thought and reality (1956), p. 249.

“We are thus able to distinguish thinking as the function which is to a large extent linguistic.”

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Benjamin Lee Whorf

Source: Language, thought and reality (1956), p. 66.

“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”

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Benjamin Lee Whorf

Whorf (1940) "Science and linguistics" in: MIT Technology Review Vol 42. p. 229-31.

“The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.”

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Benjamin Lee Whorf

Whorf (1937) "Grammer categories" in: Language, (1945) Vol 21. p. 1-11.

“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language.”

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Benjamin Lee Whorf

Source: Language, thought and reality (1956), p. 213.

“Thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it that we have is thrown by the study of language. This study shows that the forms of a person's thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language--shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family. His thinking itself is in a language—in English, in Sanskrit, in Chinese. And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.”

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Benjamin Lee Whorf

Source: Language, thought and reality (1956), p. 252.

“It needs but half an eye to see in these latter days that science, the Grand Revelator of modern Western culture, has reached, without having intended to, a frontier. Either it must bury its dead, close its ranks, and go forward into a landscape of increasing strangeness, replete with things shocking to a culture-trammeled understanding, or it must become, in Claude Houghton's expressive phrase, the plagiarist of its own past. The frontier was foreseen in principle very long ago, and given a name that has descended to our day clouded with myth. That name is Babel. For science's long and heroic effort to be strictly factual has at last brought it into entanglement with the unsuspected facts of the linguistic order. These facts the older classical science had never admitted, confronted, or understood as facts. Instead they had entered its house by the back door and had been taken for the substance of Reason itself.”

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Benjamin Lee Whorf

Source: Language, thought and reality (1956), p. 264.

“Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages. The verb tunatya contains in its idea of hope something of our words 'thought,' 'desire,' and 'cause,' which sometimes must be used to translate it.”

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Benjamin Lee Whorf

Source: Language, thought and reality (1956), p. 61.