Language, Thought and Reality

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, AND REALITY

SELECTED WRITINGS OF BENJAMIN LEE WHORF

EDITED BY

JOHN B. CARROLL

Table of Contents

Contents

Table of Contents 5

FOREWORD 6

INTRODUCTION 11

SPECIAL NOTE 34

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 34

ON THE CONNECTION OF IDEAS 36

ON PSYCHOLOGY 40

A CENTRAL MEXICAN INSCRIPTION COMBINING MEXICAN AND MAYA DAY SIGNS 42

THE PUNCTUAL AND SEGMENTATIVE ASPECTS OF VERBS IN HOPI 49

AN AMERICAN INDIAN MODEL OF THE UNIVERSE 53

A LINGUISTIC CONSIDERATION OF THINKING IN PRIMITIVE COMMUNITIES 59

GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES 76

DISCUSSION OF HOPI LINGUISTICS 83

SOME VERBAL CATEGORIES OF HOPI 83

LANGUAGE: PLAN AND CONCEPTION OF ARRANGEMENT 83

A. The sentence 83

B. The word (the word as part of the sentence) 83

THE RELATION OF HABITUAL THOUGHT AND BEHAVIOR TO LANGUAGE 83

GESTALT TECHNIQUE OF STEM COMPOSITION IN SHAWNEE 83

DECIPHERMENT OF THE LINGUISTIC PORTION OF THE MAYA HIEROGLYPHS 83

LINGUISTIC FACTORS IN THE TERMINOLOGY OF HOPI ARCHITECTURE 83

SCIENCE AND LINGUISTICS 83

LINGUISTICS AS AN EXACT SCIENCE 83

LANGUAGES AND LOGIC 83

LANGUAGE, MIND, AND REALITY 83

I 83

II 83

BIBLIOGRAPHY 83

A. PUBLISHED WRITINGS OF BENJAMIN LEE WHORF 83

В. UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS (SELECTED) 83

C. BOOKS AND ARTICLES RELATING TO WHORF’S WRITINGS (SELECTED) 83

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 83

FOREWORD

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.

As a writer, I have long been interested in semantics, sometimes defined as the systematic study of meaning. It does a writer no harm, I hold, to know what he is talking about. Whorf, using linguistics as a tool for the analysis of meaning, has made an important contribution to semantics. No careful student of communication and meaning can afford to neglect him. One might add that no philosophical scientist or scientific philosopher can afford to neglect him. Linguistics, he boldly proclaims, is fundamental to the theory of thinking, and in the last analysis to all human sciences. He is probably right. Every considerable advance in science, such as quantum theory, involves a crisis in communication. The discoverers have to explain first to themselves, and then to the scientific world, what has been found.

Whorf as I read him makes two cardinal hypotheses:

First, that all higher levels of thinking are dependent on language.

Second, that the structure of the language one habitually uses influences the manner in which one understands his environment. The picture of the universe shifts from tongue to tongue.

II

There is a good deal of competent scientific support for the first hypothesis. The biologist, Julian Huxley, for instance, declares that the evolution of verbal concepts opened the door to all further achievements of man’s thought. Language, observes Whorf, is the best show man puts on. Other creatures have developed rough communication systems, but no true language. Language is cardinal in rearing human young, in organizing human communities, in handing down the culture from generation to generation. Huxley goes so far as to venture that adaptation through the culture, depending, of course, on language, may be displacing the biological processes of evolution. When the next Ice Age moves down, for instance, instead of growing more fur, homo sapiens may step up the production of air-conditioning units.

The power to reason constitutes the uniqueness of man, to philosophers as well as biologists. Unprotected by claws, teeth, thick hide, fleetness of foot, or sheer strength, homo sapiens has to think his way out of tight places. It has been his chief weapon for survival.

Probably everyone experiences brainstorms too fast to be verbal. In writing, I frequently have them. But before I can handle such bolts from the blue, I must verbalize them, put them into words for sober reflection, or discussion. Unverbalized brainstorms do not get anywhere on paper.

Perhaps driving a car furnishes a good analogy for Whorf’s initial hypothesis. Light waves and sound waves are enough to guide the driver’s hand on the wheel along straight roads. But threading his way through a cloverleaf intersection, or reading a road map, will require a good deal more than reflex action. The first, a very clever chimpanzee might learn to do; the second is forever beyond it.

III

The Greeks, so active mentally, and so reluctant to exert themselves in observation post and laboratory,{1} were the first to inquire into logic and reason. The Sophists were apparently the Madison Avenue boys of the Aegean, teaching young men how to capsize an opponent in debate or legal case, and to choose the most effective slogans in political campaigns. Aristotle invented the syllogism, and fashioned his Three Laws of Thought, beginning with the Law of Identity, A is A, now and forever—against which we semanticists sometimes protest.

The Greeks took it for granted that back of language was a universal, uncontaminated essence of reason, shared by all men, at least by all thinkers. Words, they believed, were but the medium in which this deeper effulgence found expression. It followed that a line of thought expressed in any language could be translated without loss of meaning into any other language.

This view has persisted for 2500 years, especially in academic groves. Whorf flatly challenges it in his second major hypothesis. A change in language, he says, can transform our appreciation of the Cosmos.

The day-by-day experience of skilled translators at the United Nations goes a long way to support him. Edmund S. Glenn of the State Department, for instance, aided by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, has waded through masses of U.N. transcriptions, looking for differences in concepts due to language.{2} An English speaker in one of Mr. Glenn’s cases says I assume; the French interpreter renders it I deduce; and the Russian interpreter I consider—By that time the assumption idea is gone with the wind!

After isolating twenty similar instances, Mr. Glenn concludes that, while the translation technique was smooth enough on the surface, the degree of communication between the Russian and English-speaking delegates appears to be nil in these cases.

If there is thus some difficulty among Western peoples, all speaking varieties of Indo-European, it is not surprising that a much wider chasm yawns between languages from wholly different stocks—between the language of Hopi Indians, say, and English. This is the field which Whorf cultivated intensively, and on which he largely bases his concept of linguistic relativity.

In English we say Look at that wave. But a wave in nature never occurs as a single phenomenon. A Hopi says Look at that slosh. The Hopi word, whose nearest equivalent in English is slosh, gives a closer fit to the physics of wave motion, connoting movement in a mass.

The light flashed, we say in English. Something has to be there to make the flash; light is the subject, flash the predicate. The trend of modern physics, however, with its emphasis on the field, is away from subject-predicate propositions. Thus a Hopi Indian is the better physicist when he says Reh-pi—flash—one word for the whole performance, no subject, no predicate, no time element. We frequently read into nature ghostly entities which flash and perform other miracles. Do we supply them because some of our verbs require substantives in front of them?

The thoughts of a Hopi about events always include both space and time, for neither is found alone in his world view. Thus his language gets along adequately without tenses for its verbs, and permits him to think habitually in terms of space-time. Properly to understand Einstein’s relativity a Westerner must abandon his spoken tongue and take to the language of calculus. But a Hopi, Whorf implies, has a sort of calculus built into him.

The formal systematization of ideas in English, German, French, or Italian seems poor and jejune—in dealing with certain classes of phenomena, when contrasted with the flexibility and directness of Amerindian languages. Whorf demonstrates the trouble we Westerners have with masculine and feminine genders, and with our built-in, two valued, either-or logic.

Does the Hopi language show here a higher plane of thinking, a more rational analysis of situations than our vaunted English? Of course it does. In this field and in various others, English compared to Hopi is like a bludgeon compared to a rapier.

For other classes of phenomena English might be the rapier and Hopi the bludgeon. Both languages have been developed over the ages, largely unconsciously, to meet the experiences and problems of their speakers, and we cannot call one higher or more mature than the other. For, while human societies vary widely in their supply and consumption of artefacts, the human mind, reflected in language, shows no examples of primitive functioning....American Indian and African languages abound in finely wrought, beautifully logical discriminations about causation, action, result, dynamic or energic quality, directness of experience, all matters of the function of thinking, indeed the quintessence of the rational.

As you will see in Mr. Carroll’s excellent biography, Whorf early in his Indian language studies noted similarities between certain Mayan inscriptions and that on an Aztec temple in Tepoztlan. I climbed to that rocky shrine in the same year, 1930, though not to study the hieroglyphics. With Aztec he combined studies in Maya and then in Hopi. He found the last the most subtle and expressive of the three, and compiled a Hopi dictionary, as yet unpublished. If he seems sometimes more affectionate than coldly scientific about his Indian tongues, it is easy to forgive him.

IV

Most of the above quotations I have taken from a monograph, also hitherto unpublished, which Whorf wrote in 1936. You will find it at page 65, and it deals with the thought processes of primitive peoples. He had planned to send it to H. G. Wells and H. L. Mencken, as well as to various distinguished linguists like Sapir. I wish that he might have done so, for it brings together all his remarkable qualities: his learning, his creative imagination, his idea of linguistic relativity, and his hopes for the future. What the essay says to me, a layman, is in essence this:

There is no one metaphysical pool of universal human thought.

Speakers of different languages see the Cosmos differently, evaluate it differently, sometimes not by much, sometimes widely. Thinking is relative to the language learned. There are no primitive languages.

Research is needed to discover the world view of many unexplored languages, some now in danger of extinction.

Somewhere along the line it may be possible to develop a real international language. Some day all peoples will use language at capacity, and so think much straighter than we now do.

Theoretically this might mean the end of linguistic relativity, but it would not mean the mountain had been climbed. The next great task would be to devise new forms of speech to bring us ever closer to reality, to move capacity on and up. So far as we can envision the future, we must envision it in terms of mental growth.

It is tragic for us all that the mental growth of Benjamin Lee Whorf was so prematurely interrupted.

STUART CHASE

Georgetown, Connecticut

November 23, 1955

INTRODUCTION

I

The career of Benjamin Lee Whorf might, on the one hand, be described as that of a businessman of specialized talents—one of those individuals who by the application of out-of-the-ordinary training and knowledge together with devotion and insight can be so useful to any kind of business organization. On the other hand, his career could be described as that of an unusually competent and diligent research worker in several otherwise almost completely neglected fields of inquiry—the study of the lost writing system of the Mayas and the study of the languages of the Aztecs of Mexico and the Hopis of Arizona. Neither description, of itself, would mark him as a particularly engaging subject for biographical treatment. When it is realized, however, that he combined both these careers, achieving recognition in his business activities at the very same time that he advanced to high eminence in scholarly work—without even having undergone the usual preliminaries of formal academic study signalized by an advanced degree—and in addition injected into contemporary discussions on the study of man and his culture a challenging set of hypotheses concerning the relation of language to thinking and cognition, his biography becomes a matter of more than passing interest.

He was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, on April 24, 1897, the son of Harry Church and Sarah Edna (Lee) Whorf. He was a scion of an old American stock, his ancestors having come from England to settle in Provincetown and other parts of the Bay Colony soon after the landing of the Pilgrims. In England, the Whorf name had been found most frequently in West Riding, in Yorkshire, and there may be some obscure connection with the name of the Wharfe River in that locality.

Benjamin was very much the child of his father, as were also his two younger brothers, each in his own way. Benjamin was the intellectual, the more bookish and idea-centered. John, born in 1903, became a well-known artist, particularly noted for his watercolors. Richard, born in 1906, has distinguished himself as an actor and director on the legitimate stage and in motion pictures.

Intellectual, artist, dramatist—the father was all three. After a brief career as a rather indifferent student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (it is said that he did not care to apply himself to his engineering studies), Harry Church Whorf drifted into commercial art, or what he liked to call designing, an occupation which drew upon his talents in draftsmanship as well as his fertile imagination. In this work he was very successful. Among his productions which survive even today is the chain of little Dutch girls which encircles each tin of a well-known brand of cleansing powder. He made himself a master of the then rapidly developing art of photolithography. But he was not content to remain within the confines of his occupation. He lent his artistic talents to numerous enterprises, stage designing being the foremost of these. He also wrote and directed plays for church groups and charitable organizations, and he wrote the libretto for Bobby Shaftoe, a musical comedy which was once given a performance in Boston. He enjoyed giving illustrated lectures on various subjects, and apparently had a knack of pleasing an audience. At the time of his death in 1934, he was at work on a manuscript concerning the Massachusetts littoral—its geology, history, fauna and flora, and so forth.

Even before the birth of their first child, Harry Whorf and his wife had taken up residence in a modest house in Winthrop, a residential suburb situated on a peninsula which flanks Boston harbor on the north. With the collections of drawings, books, manuscripts, chemicals, photographic equipment, and odds and ends which the father had accumulated, the house provided a stimulating environment for three abnormally curious and inquisitive boys, all endowed with talents with which to take advantage of it. Like his brothers after him, Benjamin early acquired some considerable skill in drawing, but the chemicals, dyes, and photographic apparatus intrigued him most. He loved to perform such experiments as the one in which liquids of various colors are made to form different layers in a single vessel. It may have been his early experiences with chemicals which led Benjamin later to choose to study chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He went to the public schools of Winthrop, through the high school, where we are told he did well. We are further told that he developed his powers of concentration at this time—even to the extent of apparent absentmindedness. Once, on being sent to the cellar to fill the coal hod, he brought it, filled, all the way back to his room rather than to its place beside the kitchen stove. (Later in his life, friends occasionally complained that he passed them on the street without even a sign of recognition.) While not especially strong, he had sufficient confidence in his physical prowess to protect his younger brothers from neighborhood bullies. Particularly with John, who was six years his junior, he liked to play intellectual games. A favorite was the game of secret codes; Benjamin could nearly always solve even the most complex ciphers his brother could devise. In the meantime, while alone, Benjamin read voraciously and amused himself with composing humorous verse.

After graduation from Winthrop High School in 1914, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, majoring in chemical engineering (Course X). His academic performance there appears to have been of only average quality; his record shows no marks in the highest category (H, corresponding to what is now ordinarily called A), even in English composition or in French. This is, of course, a commentary on the precarious relationship which exists between performance rated in college and performance in later life. In the fall term of his senior year, a mysterious illness acquired in an ROTC summer camp forced Whorf to be absent from classes; the necessity of making up deficiencies the following summer delayed his obtaining the degree of Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering until October 1918.

We do not know what sort of professional career Whorf planned for himself while a student at M.I.T. Most probably, he hoped to find employment as an engineer in some type of chemical production plant or factory. His professional career was to prove most unusual, for he emerged as a specialist in a line of work which, as he once complained in a letter to his M.I.T. alumni organization, was at the time hardly recognized as a distinct field of engineering even by his alma mater. In 1919, not long after his graduation from he was selected as a trainee in fire prevention engineering by the company which employed him for twenty-two years, up to the time of his death. According to an account prepared by C. S. Kremer, Chairman of the Board, Hartford Fire Insurance Company, he was selected by an officer of the company, Mr. F. C. Moore, who was himself an M.I.T. graduate and had charge of the underwriting and handling of the insurance on buildings equipped with automatic sprinklers. After graduating from the company school which Mr. Moore conducted for fire prevention engineers, Whorf was assigned to the home office of the company, in Hartford, to assist in fire prevention inspection of properties insured by the company in the north eastern part of the country. The company was starting to develop what was then a new idea in the business, namely, fire-prevention engineering inspections as a service to the property owner and policy bolder. In this work, which necessitated constant travel, he became extremely skillful. In no time at all, writes Kremer, he became in my opinion as thorough and fast a fire prevention inspector as there ever has been....He was intensely practical and taught what he knew as facts to engineers and skillful men in various manufacturing businesses. He specialized more and more in the inspection of plants which utilized chemical processes in manufacturing.

On one occasion while inspecting a chemical plant he was refused admission to a certain building on the ground that it housed a secret process. Even the head of the plant, to whom he was referred, insisted that no outsider could inspect this building. Whorf said, You are making such-and-such a product? The answer was Yes, whereupon Whorf picked up a pad, quickly wrote down a chemical formula, and handed it to the head of the plant, saying, I think this is what you are doing. The surprised manufacturer replied, How in the world did you know, Mr. Whorf?, to which Whorf answered calmly, You couldn’t do it in any other way. Needless to say, he was admitted to the building which contained the secret process.

He was so much respected among chemical manufacturers that his advice was eagerly sought. In an inspection of a very complicated chemical plant in Connecticut, he suggested to the management that a certain process be abandoned until it could be made safer, and indicated how this could be done. Some time later, after the suggested improvements had been made, the management delayed starting the process for several days until Whorf could return to the plant and approve going ahead.

He was admired not only for his technical skill but also, strange as it may seem to anyone who may know only Whorf’s linguistic work, for his ability to attract business for his company. He was once asked to make a fire prevention inspection of some public schools on which the company had only a trifling amount of business. The recommendations which he submitted so impressed the school board that they decided to appoint Whorf’s company as the manager of their insurance account, quite to the surprise of the local agent, who had found this particular school board difficult to approach.

The value put on Whorf’s services by his employer was signalized by his appointment in 1928 as Special Agent, and by his election in 1940 as Assistant Secretary of his company. It may have been that the company was proud of his accomplishments in linguistics and anthropology, and we know that it was liberal in granting him occasional leaves to carry on these activities,{3} but he was valued primarily for his actual services to his employer, which must have been of a high order, far beyond the ordinary. It is truly remarkable that he was able to achieve distinction in two entirely separate kinds of work. During certain periods of his life, his scholarly output was enough to equal that of many a full-time research professor; yet he must have been at the same time spending some eight hours every working day in his business pursuits. His friends often speculated on why he chose to remain in his occupation. Although several offers of academic or scholarly research positions were made to him during the latter years of his life, he consistently refused them, saying that his business situation afforded him a more comfortable living and a freer opportunity to develop his intellectual interests in his own way.

As if his insurance work, his linguistic studies, and his extensive reading were not enough to occupy him, he found time for certain community activities, such as serving on a fire prevention committee of the Hartford Chamber of Commerce. From about 1928 on, he became increasingly popular as a lecturer before men’s clubs, historical societies, and the like.{4}

In 1920 he married Celia Inez Peckham, by whom he had three children, Raymond Ben, Robert Peckham, and Celia Lee. In somewhat the same way that his father had done for him, he was able to arouse in his children, as if by magnetic induction, something like his delightful curiosity and his unhesitating imagination.

By his own account, Whorf did not become interested in linguistics until 1924, but one can trace a distinct succession of intellectual enthusiasms which led him to this. Even as a boy, along with his preoccupation with chemistry experiments, he was an avid reader. He became interested in Middle American prehistory through reading (several times, we are told) Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico. On one occasion his father was engaged in doing the stage designs for a play which he had written about a Maya princess, and in this connection assembled all manner of books about Maya archaeology. Young Ben was intrigued with the resulting display of stage designs, which doubtless portrayed ornate façades of Maya temples, and he may have begun to wonder about the meaning of Maya hieroglyphs. The interest in secret ciphers, mentioned earlier, may have reinforced this curiosity, but, if so, it lay dormant until a somewhat later period. Instead, he began to spend a good deal of time on a variety of scientific topics. He became interested in botany, and learned the English and Latin names for thousands of plants and trees. (This was a lasting interest; on his trip to Mexico in 1930 he took copious notes on Mexican flora, and as late as 1936 we find him filling several pages of one of his linguistic notebooks with a quiz on botanical terminology and curiosities.) As if to contrast with this, he was for a time intensely interested in astrology and amused himself with casting horoscopes for his friends. At some time in his adolescence he began to manifest what might seem an almost pathological graphomania, for at the age of 17 he began to keep a diary, a practice which he continued throughout his life. He contrived some sort of secret writing which he occasionally used to conceal some of the contents of his diaries, and which he also used to record his dreams in a series of dreambooks.

Shortly after settling in Hartford, Whorf became increasingly concerned about the supposed conflict between science and religion. It seems that he had been deeply impressed by the fundamentalist shadings of his Methodist Episcopal religious background, which at times seemed to controvert the current doctrines in science. He became so deeply preoccupied with this issue that he wrote a 130,000-word manuscript on the subject, described as a book of religious philosophy in the form of a novel. This manuscript, completed in 1925, was submitted to several publishers and as promptly rejected by them, even over his protests. Another, briefer manuscript prepared about this time was entitled Why I have discarded evolution. An eminent geneticist to whom it was submitted for comment made a very courteous reply, starting with the admission that, although the manuscript at first appeared to be the work of a crank, its skill and perceptiveness soon marked it as otherwise, but continuing with a point-by-point rebuttal of Whorf’s arguments.

In the meantime, Whorf’s reading led him to believe that the key to the apparent discrepancy between the Biblical and the scientific accounts of cosmogony and evolution might lie in a penetrating linguistic exegesis of the Old Testament. For this reason, in 1924 he turned his mind to the study of Hebrew.

It may come as a surprise to some that Whorf’s interest in linguistics stemmed from one in religion. The reader may incidentally be reminded of the considerable connection which has long existed between linguistic and religious enterprises—the philological work represented in the Septuagint, in Ulfilas’s creation of the written Gothic into which he could translate the Bible, in the study of hundreds of non-European languages by missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in the thoroughly scientific investigations being carried out by contemporary linguistic missionaries. Whorf, however, was not interested in any translation of the Bible, at least not in any ordinary sense; he seriously believed that fundamental human and philosophical problems could be solved by taking a new sounding of the semantics of the Bible. Whether this conviction was independently reached by him we do not know. We do know that sometime during 1924 there came to his attention a book which could have buttressed his beliefs, and which at any rate drew him closer to linguistics. He himself gives testimony of this in a hitherto unpublished paper which appears in the present collection. This book, hardly known to contemporary scholars, was by a French dramatist, philologist, and mystic of the early nineteenth century, Antoine Fabre d’Olivet (1768-1825). It was entitled La langue hébraïque restituée, and was published in two volumes in Paris in 1815-16. Whorf most probably read an English translation of this scarce work published in 1921, for the name of the translator, Nayán Louise Redfield, appears in his notes.{5}

According to the Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, Fabre d’Olivet died avec le reputation d’un fou ou d’un visionnaire. A rather indifferent dramatist, he retired in his later life to extensive philological lucubrations. In La langue hébraïque, his major work in this field, he attempted to show that the hidden meanings of the Book of Genesis could be elucidated by an analysis au fond of the structure of the triliteral Hebrew root. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, according to him, contained an inherent meaning; for example, the letter Aleph was to him the sign of the power and stability of ideas, of unity and the principle which determines it. The letter Yodh was a sign of manifestation; thus the partial root Aleph-Yodh designates, wrote Fabre d’Olivet, the center towards which the will tends, the place where it enfixes itself, the sphere of activity in which it operates. Since he concluded that the letter Tsadhe denoted termination, he was not surprised to find that the triliteral root Aleph-Yodh (or Waw)-Tsadhe meant any desire tending toward an end. The principle of the root-sign was applied to all parts of Hebrew grammar, and to the interpretation of several hundred Hebrew roots. The whole was offered as partly a linguistic study to illuminate the principles of language (he claimed having been hard put to choose whether Chinese, Sanskrit, or Hebrew would be the basis for his project), and partly as the fulfilment of his desire to discover the secret meaning of the cosmogony of Moses. In the English translation which Fabre d’Olivet himself obligingly provided, the first verse of the Bible comes out as follows: ‘At-FIRST-IN-PRINCIPLE, he created, Ælohim (he caused to be, he brought forth in principle, HE-the-Gods, the-Being-of-Beings), the-selfsameness-of-heavens, and-the-selfsameness-of-earth.’ He tosses off the comment that this is not a mere result of some system he has established on the basis of more or less happy conjectures or probabilities, but the very language of Moses which I have interpreted according to its structural principles, which I have taken pains to develop to a satisfactory point.

Despite the dubiety of Fabre d’Olivet’s startling results, his book seems to have made a strong impression on Whorf, who later characterized him as having been "one of