taken as mutually supportive evidence of language's influence on cognition. Drawing on Nietzsche's ideas of perspectivism Alfred Korzybski developed the theory of general semantics that has been compared to Whorf's notions of linguistic relativity. Though influential in their own right, this work has not been influential in the debate on linguistic relativity, which has tended to center on the American paradigm exemplified by Sapir and Whorf. Benjamin Lee Whorf More than any linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf has become associated with what he called the "linguistic relativity principle". Studying Native American languages, he attempted to account for the ways in which grammatical systems and language-use differences affected perception. Whorf's opinions regarding the nature of the relation between language and thought remain under contention. However, a version of theory holds some "merit," for example, "different words mean different things in different languages; not every word in every language has a one-to-one exact translation in a different language" Critics such as Lenneberg,. Black, and Pinker attribute to Whorf a strong linguistic determinism, while Lucy, Silverstein and Levinson point to Whorf's explicit rejections of determinism, and where he contends that translation and commensuration are possible. Detractors such as Lenneberg, Chomsky and Pinker criticized him for insufficient clarity in his description of how language influences thought, and for not proving his conjectures. Most of his arguments were in the form of anecdotes and speculations that served as attempts to show how "exotic" grammatical traits were connected to what were apparently equally exotic worlds of thought. In Whorf's words: Among Whorf's best-known examples of linguistic relativity are instances where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE "Standard Average European" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of less-studied languages). One of Whorf's examples was the supposedly large number of words for 'snow' in the Inuit language, an example which later was contested as a misrepresentation. Another is the Hopi language's words for water, one indicating drinking water in a container and another indicating a natural body of water. These examples of polysemy served the double purpose of showing that indigenous languages sometimes made more fine grained semantic distinctions than European languages and that direct translation between two languages, even of seemingly basic concepts such as snow or