Some context: Benjamin Lee Whorf (; April 24, 1897 - July 26, 1941) was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer. Whorf is widely known as an advocate for the idea that differences between the structures of different languages shape how their speakers perceive and conceptualize the world. This principle has frequently been called the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis", after him and his mentor Edward Sapir, but Whorf called it the principle of linguistic relativity, because he saw the idea as having implications similar to Einstein's principle of physical relativity. Throughout his life Whorf was a chemical engineer by profession, but as a young man he took up an interest in linguistics.
Whorf's distinction between "overt" (phenotypical) and "covert" (cryptotypical) grammatical categories has become widely influential in linguistics and anthropology. British linguist Michael Halliday wrote about Whorf's notion of the "cryptotype", and the conception of "how grammar models reality", that it would "eventually turn out to be among the major contributions of twentieth century linguistics". Furthermore, Whorf introduced the concept of the allophone, a word that describes positional phonetic variants of a single superordinate phoneme; in doing so he placed a cornerstone in consolidating early phoneme theory. The term was popularized by G. L. Trager and Bernard Bloch in a 1941 paper on English phonology and went on to become part of standard usage within the American structuralist tradition. Whorf considered allophones to be another example of linguistic relativity. The principle of allophony describes how acoustically different sounds can be treated as reflections of a single phoneme in a language. This sometimes makes the different sound appear similar to native speakers of the language, even to the point that they are unable to distinguish them auditorily without special training. Whorf wrote that: "[allophones] are also relativistic. Objectively, acoustically, and physiologically the allophones of [a] phoneme may be extremely unlike, hence the impossibility of determining what is what. You always have to keep the observer in the picture. What linguistic pattern makes like is like, and what it makes unlike is unlike".(Whorf, 1940) Central to Whorf's inquiries was the approach later described as metalinguistics by G. L. Trager, who in 1950 published four of Whorf's essays as "Four articles on Metalinguistics". Whorf was crucially interested in the ways in which speakers come to be aware of the language that they use, and become able to describe and analyze language using language itself to do so. Whorf saw that the ability to arrive at progressively more accurate descriptions of the world hinged partly on the ability to construct a metalanguage to describe how language affects experience, and thus to have the ability to calibrate different conceptual schemes. Whorf's endeavors have since been taken up in the development of the study of metalinguistics and metalinguistic awareness, first by Michael Silverstein who published a radical and influential rereading of Whorf in 1979 and subsequently in the field of linguistic anthropology.
What languages and cultures did he helped with?
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Some context: Yoani Maria Sanchez Cordero (born September 4, 1975) is a Cuban blogger who has achieved international fame and multiple international awards for her critical portrayal of life in Cuba under its current government. Sanchez attended primary school during the affluent time when the Soviet Union was providing considerable aid to Cuba. However, her high school and university education coincided with the loss of financial aid to Cuba following the Soviet Union's collapse, creating a highly public educational system and style of living that subsequently left Sanchez with a strong need for personal privacy. Sanchez's university education left her with two understandings; first, that she had acquired a disgust for "high culture", and second that she no longer had an interest in philology, her chosen field of university study.
Given the challenges of blogging in Cuba, the number of blogs on the DesdeCuba site grew quickly. Eight months after she started Generation Y, she was joined on the Desdecuba website by her husband Reinaldo Escobar's blog, Desde Aqui (From Here), in December 2007. In January three more Desdecuba blogs were launched: Sin EVAsion (Without Evasion); El Blog de Dimas (The Blog of Dimas); and Retazos (Fragments). In March 2008, Potro Salvaje (Wild Pony) was launched, joined by La Colmena (The Beehive) in May 2008. When the Cuban government blocked access to Sanchez's blog from the island, it also blocked access to the DesdeCuba website, where these other blogs were housed. The other bloggers faced the same challenges Sanchez had in maintaining their blogs, and also needed to find ways around the censorship--either relying on friends with access inside Cuba from their government offices, using complex and time-consuming workarounds to find 'back doors' into their blogs, or reaching out to friends and strangers abroad who volunteered to help, and who posted email blog entries they would never be able to see. With their blogs targeted to Cuban readers on the island, the discouragement was compounded by knowing that even if they could post, their readers could not read the posts. This limitation was circumvented by making copies of the blogs on CDs, either from computers on the island with access to the website, or sent from friends abroad. Although this method of disseminating the blogs was slow and delayed, and readers could not comment directly on the website, it was quite effective and continues to this day [March 2009]. Sanchez said to a known Venezuelan blogger that visited her in Havana: "In any case we are trying to educate others so blogging would become in Cuba a permanent feature, a means of democratizing citizen expression, as in the free world." On January 28, Sanchez launched Voces Cubanas. This citizen journalism project seeks to provide a multimedia platform to independent bloggers in Cuba to express the realities and hardships of everyday life there. During an interview published by Global Voices, Sanchez said this was a website "where all those who want to express ideas, put their projects online, can do so." An article in El Nuevo Herald by Ivette Leyva Martinez, speaks to the role played by Sanchez and other young people, outside the Cuban opposition and dissidence movements, in working towards a free and democratic Cuba today. On March 29, 2009, at a performance by Tania Bruguera, a podium with an open microphone was staged for those wishing to have one minute of uncensored, public speech. Sanchez was among speakers who publicly criticized censorship and said that "the time has come to jump over the wall of control". The Communist regime dismissed the event and Sanchez without using her name.
How did Desdecuba grow?
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three more Desdecuba blogs were launched: Sin EVAsion (Without Evasion); El Blog de Dimas (The Blog of Dimas); and Retazos (Fragments).