He also includes a detailed survey of modern scholars and their interpretations: Ann Moss, Richard Waswo, Erika Rummel, Edward Sapir and
Benjamin Whorf. The humanists Vives and Valla both adhered to this linguistic determinism, and so do many modern scholars to this very day.
228) Sapir's student,
Benjamin Whorf, compared the Hopi language with Western European languages and concluded that their different structures reflected different world views and values: the Hopi place primacy on living in harmony with nature; in contrast, the Europeans valorize things and ways of marking time; hence, the preoccupation with "records, diaries, book-keeping, accounting ...
Thus onwards to Ferdinand de Saussure and
Benjamin Whorf. Again, the absence of von Uexkull (and, after him, Thomas Sebeok), who argued that all organisms live in signifying worlds, although only humans have language, remains a puzzling omission.
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Benjamin Whorf, "Science and linguistics," Technology Review 42:229-231 (1940).
Benjamin Whorf (1956), an American specialist on Indian languages, has stated that a language influences our thoughts.
To buttress this argument, the co-creator of the hypothesis, anthropologist
Benjamin Whorf, noted that "after long and careful study," he had found that the language of the Hopi Indians, "contain no words, grammatical forms, constructions, or expressions that refer directly to what we call 'time.'" In 1983, the linguist Ekkehart Malotki, after doing a great deal of fieldwork, published a book called Hopi Time that showed the Hopis actually had a lot of words referring to time.
To some extent, this idea challenges the nearly 70-year-old argument of Edward Sapir and
Benjamin Whorf, both Yale University anthropologists.
Their spirit was carried forward by linguists Edward Sapir and
Benjamin Whorf, who in 1956 famously hypothesized that the "laws of thought" are different for speakers of different languages.