Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas (UNICAMP)

In his forward, Stephen Levinson sums up the unbelievably checkered life of this book, first published in 1956 and now hitting the stands again: ‘Initially admired, then reviled, then rehabilitated, then once again attacked, it has proved unsinkable’ (vii). He goes on to expatiate on why Benjamin Lee Whorf’s name is so controversial and often invites acerbic and disparaging dismissals. Nevertheless, the very fact that it continues to resurface every now and then bears testimony to its vitality and robustness.

The book is a collection of eighteen of Whorf’s seminal papers. These cover his fourteen years as a part-time academic. Whorf published very little during his short span of life, which ended in 1941 at the age of forty-four. The book contains some material Whorf left unpublished, along with the original introduction to the book by John B. Carroll, spanning forty-three pages. In addition, the so-called ‘Yale report’ (a report on linguistic research in the Department of Anthropology of Yale University from September 1937 to June 1938) is reproduced in full as an appendix. According to Levinson, Whorf wrote it alone, although the name of George Trager appears as coauthor, as he ‘probably intended to revise it’ (xix).

Undoubtedly, as Levinson makes clear, the renewed interest in Whorf today is taking place in tandem with the decline in enthusiasm for the generative paradigm and disenchantment with its unflinching commitment to universalism against all mounting evidence to the contrary. Whorf’s ideas on connections among the three concepts highlighted in the title of this book, namely, language, thought, and reality, have immense resonance among contemporary researchers.

Curiously enough, the opening text in the book is an unpublished essay dated 1927, ‘partly type-written, partly hand-written’ as part of a correspondence addressed to a certain Dr. English, is titled ‘On the connection of ideas’. Whorf examines words, not ideas, in a manner that reminds one of ordinary language philosophers, notably J. L. Austin. The last four essays, namely, ‘Science and linguistics (1940)’, ‘Linguistics as an exact science (1940)’, ‘Languages and logic (1941)’, and ‘Language, mind, and reality (1941)’, contain food for thought valid even today.

No fewer than eight of the essays deal with indigenous languages of America. They cover a diverse array of topics. Three others draw on Whorf’s field experience but address topics of a more general, philosophical interest. The odd one out, titled ‘On psychology’, is an undated fragment. Whorf impresses the reader with his forthrightness in claims such as the following: ‘Psychology has developed a field of research that may no doubt be useful or valuable in itself; but it throws little or no light on the problems of the normal human mind or soul’ (51).