The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is controversial on many levels, starting with its name. Linguists Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir were close collaborators in the first decades of the 20th century, but they never actually published a hypothesis together about language and cognition. Sapir himself didn’t seem to fully embrace the ideas behind the hypothesis, according to Goddard, who has seen the film (and liked it). It was only after Sapir died in 1939 and wasn’t around to “rein him in,” Goddard says, that his student, Whorf, took Sapir’s thoughts in the more extreme direction that would later become enshrined in the theory named for them. Whorf’s theory stemmed in part from his study of the Eskimo vocabulary for snow. Citing the work of Sapir’s mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas, Whorf argued that because the Eskimo people lived so intimately with the snow of the Arctic, they had developed far more terms to describe it than people of other cultures. “We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow—whatever the situation may be,” Whorf wrote in the MIT Technology Review in 1940, a year after Sapir’s death. “To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different, different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow.” Inspired by Albert Einstein’s concept of relativity, Whorf called this concept “linguistic relativity.” The exoticness yet simplicity of Whorf’s Eskimo snow example quickly made it a favorite trope among writers and would-be intellectuals. “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages,” Whorf wrote. “The grammar of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas.” Linguistic relativity was packaged and popularized in the 1950s by some of Sapir’s other students. But in the following decades, the theory was ridiculed and dismissed by followers of the linguist Noam Chomsky, who argued that all languages share certain grammatical characteristics. Actually, Chomsky argued, human evolution and the brain have helped determine how languages are formed. “The more you examine Whorf’s arguments, the less sense they make,” linguist Steven Pinker scoffed in his 1994 book The Language Instinct. Many critics of Whorf and linguistic relativity have accused him of misinterpreting Boas’ work and the Eskimo languages as a whole. In a provocative 1991 paper titled “The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax,” University of Edinburgh linguist Geoffrey Pullum compared the Eskimo snow anecdote to the creature in the movie Alien, which “seemed to spring up everywhere once it got loose on the spaceship, and was very difficult to kill.” “The fact is that the myth of the multiple words for snow is based on almost nothing at all,” Pullum wrote. “It is a kind of accidentally developed hoax perpetrated by the anthropological linguistics community on itself.” - http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/does-century-old-linguistic-hypothesis-center-film-arrival-have-any-merit-180961284/