Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States. Sapir was born in German Pomerania, in what is now northern Poland.
In 1888, when he was four years old, the family moved to Liverpool, England, and in 1890 to the United States, to Richmond, Virginia.
In 1888, when he was four years old, the family moved to Liverpool, England, and in 1890 to the United States, to Richmond, Virginia.
Through the scholarship Sapir supplemented his mother's meager earnings. ===Education at Columbia=== Sapir entered Columbia in 1901, still paying with the Pulitzer scholarship.
Sapir's 1905 Master's thesis was an analysis of Johann Gottfried Herder's Treatise on the Origin of Language, and included examples from Inuit and Native American languages, not at all familiar to a Germanicist.
Having finished his coursework, Sapir moved on to his doctoral fieldwork, spending several years in short term appointments while working on his dissertation. ====Early fieldwork==== Sapir's first fieldwork was on the Wishram Chinook language in the summer of 1905, funded by the Bureau of American Ethnology.
In the summer of 1906 he worked on Takelma and Chasta Costa.
The dissertation foreshadowed several important trends in Sapir's work, particularly the careful attention to the intuition of native speakers regarding sound patterns that later would become the basis for Sapir's formulation of the phoneme. In 1907–1908 Sapir was offered a position at the University of California at Berkeley, where Boas' first student Alfred Kroeber was the head of a project under the California state survey to document the Indigenous languages of California.
Sapir's work on Takelma became his doctoral dissertation, which he defended in 1908.
in Anthropology which he completed in 1909. ====College==== Sapir emphasized language study in his college years at Columbia, studying Latin, Greek, and French for eight semesters.
Sapir gathered a volume of Wishram texts, published 1909, and he managed to achieve a much more sophisticated understanding of the Chinook sound system than Boas.
At Pennsylvania he worked closely with another student of Boas, Frank Speck, and the two undertook work on Catawba in the summer of 1909.
Also in the summer of 1909, Sapir went to Utah with his student J.
They formally divorced in 1910.
In the end Sapir didn't finish the work during the allotted year, and Kroeber was unable to offer him a longer appointment. Disappointed at not being able to stay at Berkeley, Sapir devoted his best efforts to other work, and did not get around to preparing any of the Yana material for publication until 1910, to Kroeber's deep disappointment. Sapir ended up leaving California early to take up a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught Ethnology and American Linguistics.
Sapir, who by then had given up the hope of working at one of the few American research universities, accepted the appointment and moved to Ottawa. ===In Ottawa=== In the years 1910–25 Sapir established and directed the Anthropological Division in the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa.
From 1912 Florence's health deteriorated due to a lung abscess, and a resulting depression.
(The belts were finally returned to the Iroquois in 1988.) He also argued for the reversal of a Canadian law prohibiting the Potlatch ceremony of the West Coast tribes. ====Work with Ishi==== In 1915 Sapir returned to California, where his expertise on the Yana language made him urgently needed.
Sapir traveled to San Francisco and worked with Ishi over the summer of 1915, having to invent new methods for working with a monolingual speaker.
Notes on Judeo-German phonology, 1915). Sapir was active in the international auxiliary language movement.
Ishi died of his illness in early 1916, and Kroeber partly blamed the exacting nature of working with Sapir for his failure to recover.
Florence was hospitalized for long periods both for her depressions and for the lung abscess, and she died in 1924 due to an infection following surgery, providing the final incentive for Sapir to leave Canada.
The Sapir household continued to be managed largely by Grandmother Eva, until Sapir remarried in 1926.
He directed the Association from 1930 to 1931, and was a member of its Consultative Counsel for Linguistic Research from 1927 to 1938.
Their son Paul Edward Sapir was born in 1928.
In the 1929 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica he published what was then the most authoritative classification of Native American languages, and the first based on evidence from modern comparative linguistics.
This fruitful collaboration laid the ground work for the classical description of the Southern Paiute language published in 1930, and enabled Sapir to produce conclusive evidence linking the Shoshonean languages to the Nahuan languages – establishing the Uto-Aztecan language family.
He directed the Association from 1930 to 1931, and was a member of its Consultative Counsel for Linguistic Research from 1927 to 1938.
Sapir also exerted influence through his membership in the Chicago School of Sociology, and his friendship with psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan. ===At Yale=== From 1931 until his death in 1939, Sapir taught at Yale University, where he became the head of the Department of Anthropology.
He directed the Association from 1930 to 1931, and was a member of its Consultative Counsel for Linguistic Research from 1927 to 1938.
His research on Southern Paiute, in collaboration with consultant Tony Tillohash, led to a 1933 article which would become influential in the characterization of the phoneme. Although noted for his work on American linguistics, Sapir wrote prolifically in linguistics in general.
(For a time he dated Sapir's daughter.) In 1936 Sapir clashed with the Institute for Human Relations over the research proposal by anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, who proposed a study of the black community of Indianola, Mississippi.
Sapir eventually lost the discussion and Powdermaker had to leave Yale. In the summer of 1937 while teaching at the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America in Ann Arbor, Sapir began having problems with a heart condition that had initially been diagnosed a couple of years earlier.
In 1938, he had to take a leave from Yale, during which Benjamin Lee Whorf taught his courses and G.
He directed the Association from 1930 to 1931, and was a member of its Consultative Counsel for Linguistic Research from 1927 to 1938.
Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States. Sapir was born in German Pomerania, in what is now northern Poland.
Sapir also exerted influence through his membership in the Chicago School of Sociology, and his friendship with psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan. ===At Yale=== From 1931 until his death in 1939, Sapir taught at Yale University, where he became the head of the Department of Anthropology.
After Sapir's death in 1939, G.
In his paper "The Function of an International Auxiliary Language", he argued for the benefits of a regular grammar and advocated a critical focus on the fundamentals of language, unbiased by the idiosyncrasies of national languages, in the choice of an international auxiliary language. He was the first Research Director of the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA), which presented the Interlingua conference in 1951.
(The belts were finally returned to the Iroquois in 1988.) He also argued for the reversal of a Canadian law prohibiting the Potlatch ceremony of the West Coast tribes. ====Work with Ishi==== In 1915 Sapir returned to California, where his expertise on the Yana language made him urgently needed.
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