Whorf based his own writings about the linguistic relativity principle greatly on
Sapir’s thoughts. Having established a solid overview of Sapir’s perspective, it is comparatively easy to understand Whorf’s further elaboration. Lee (1996) explains it as follows: “Whorf’s ideas themselves form a complex interweaving whole, so Sapir’s influence penetrates every strand of his thinking [...]” (p.23). Their writings have caused a great uproar in the academic world, thus it is essential to be very accurate with the sources, but first of all the historical background of the SWH is displayed. Already Sapir noticed that his ideas are not revolutionary and thus “he would [then] be spared the humiliating discovery that many new ideas, many apparently brilliant philosophic conceptions, are little more than rearrangements of familiar words in formally satisfying patterns” (Sapir, 1924, p. 174).
a) History
Whorf formulated the “linguistic relativity theory” in the 1930s, but he was not the first to write about the relationship of thoughts and language. Schlesinger dates the first mentions of such relations back to Francis Bacon in the 16th century (Schlesinger, 1991, p. 12), while philosophers even trace those ideas back to the antiquity (Preston, 1997, p. 1).2 It was not the novelty of such ideas that the SWH was named after Whorf, but his hyperbolic writing style, radicalism and “the prevailing intellectual climate of the time” made him the most popular representative (Schlesinger, 1991, p. 24). Nevertheless, there is a scientific consensus – one of the few - that Wilhelm von Humboldt majorly influenced Sapir and Whorf (Koerner, 1990; Lehmann, 1998; Schlesinger, 1991; Wenzel, 2010). Wilhelm von Humboldt