Edward Sapir Information

Edward Sapir ( / s ə ˈ p ɪər /; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was a German-born American anthropologist-linguist and a leader in American structural linguistics. His name is borrowed in what is now called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. He was a highly influential figure in American linguistics, influencing several generations of linguists across several schools of the discipline.

Youth and Education

Sapir was born in Lauenburg in the Province of Pomerania to an orthodox Jewish family. His family immigrated to New York in the United States in 1888.

Sapir earned both a B.A. (1904) and an M.A. (1905) in Germanic philology from Columbia. Among his mentors in Germanics were William Carpenter.

Work with Boas

His linguistic interests proved to be much broader. In the next two years he took up studies of the Wishram and Takelma languages of Native Americans in southwestern Oregon. In 1909 he received his Ph.D. in anthropology, just emerging as a new field of study. While a graduate student at Columbia, Sapir met his mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas. The latter was likely the person who provided the most impetus for Sapir's study of indigenous languages of the Americas.

Boas arranged Sapir's employment in 1907–08 researching the nearly extinct Yana language of northern California. Sapir returned there in 1915 to work with Ishi, the monolingual last surviving speaker of Yahi (southern Yana).

At Ottawa

In the years 1910–25 Sapir established and directed the Anthropological Division in the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa. When he was hired, he was one of the first full-time anthropologists in Canada.

Among the many accomplishments of this productive period were a series of substantial publications on Nootka and other languages, and his seminal book Language (1921). Alec Thomas assisted with interviews. It is still important today and accessible to educated lay people.

As Sapir left for a teaching position at the University of Chicago, one of the few research universities then in the United States, he enabled Leonard Bloomfield to obtain support from Ottawa to do fieldwork on Cree language. This was essential to Bloomfield's project of historical reconstruction in Algonquian languages.

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 was one of the first to explore the relations between language studies and anthropology. His students included Fang-kuei Li, Benjamin Whorf, Mary Haas, and Harry Hoijer. Sapir came to regard a young Semiticist named Zellig Harris as his intellectual heir, although Harris was never a formal student of Sapir. (For a time he dated Sapir's daughter.)^[1] Sapir also exerted influence through his membership in the Chicago School of Sociology, and his friendship with psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan.

Some of Sapir's suggestions about the influence of language on the ways in which people think were adopted and developed by Whorf. They both believed that stimulating and challenging theories would attract students to this fledgling field. During the 1940s and later, this concept became known as the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. Late work of Harris supported their hypothesis.

Breadth of Languages Studied

Sapir's special focus among American languages was in the Athabaskan languages, a family which especially fascinated him: "Dene is probably the son-of-a-bitchiest language in America to actually know...most fascinating of all languages ever invented." (Krauss 1986:157) Sapir also studied the languages and cultures of Wishram Chinook, Navajo, Nootka, Paiute, Takelma, and Yana. 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.^[2]

Although noted for his work on American linguistics, Sapir wrote prolifically in linguistics in general. His book Language provides everything from a grammar-typological classification of languages (with examples ranging from Chinese to Nootka) to speculation on the phenomenon of language drift, and the arbitrariness of associations between language, race, and culture. Sapir was also a pioneer in Yiddish studies (his first language) in the United States (cf. Notes on Judeo-German phonology, 1915).

Sapir was active in the international auxiliary language movement. 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. He directed the Association from 1930 to 1931, and was a member of its Consultative Counsel for Linguistic Research from 1927 to 1938.^[3] Sapir consulted with Alice Vanderbilt Morris to develop the research program of IALA.^[4]

Selected publications

Books

• Sapir, Edward (1907). Herder's "Ursprung der Sprache". Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ASIN: B0006CWB2W.
• Sapir, Edward (1908). "On the etymology of Sanskrit asru, Avestan asru, Greek dakru". In Modi, Jivanji Jamshedji. Spiegel memorial volume. Papers on Iranian subjects written by various scholars in honour of the late Dr. Frederic Spiegel. Bombay: British India Press. pp. 156–159
• Sapir, Edward; Curtin, Jeremiah (1909). Wishram texts, together with Wasco tales and myths. E.J. Brill. ISBN 0404581528. ASIN: B000855RIW. http://www.archive.org/details/wishramtexts00sapirich.
• Sapir, Edward (1910). Yana Texts. Berkeley University Press. ISBN 1177112868. http://www.archive.org/details/yanatexts00sapirich.
• Sapir, Edward (1915). A sketch of the social organization of the Nass River Indians. Ottawa: Government Printing Office. http://www.archive.org/details/sketchofsocialor00sapiiala.
• Sapir, Edward (1915). Noun reduplication in Comox, a Salish language of Vancouver island. Ottawa: Government Printing Office. http://www.archive.org/details/nounreduplicatio00sapirich.
• Sapir, Edward (1916). Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture, A Study in Method. Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau. http://www.archive.org/details/timeperspectivei00sapirich.
• Sapir, Edward (1917). Dreams and Gibes. Boston: The Gorham Press. ISBN 054856941X. http://www.archive.org/details/dreamsgibes00sapirich.
• Sapir, Edward (1921). Language: An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace and company. ISBN 0246110740. ASIN: B000NGWX8I. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12629.
• Sapir, Edward; Swadesh, Morris (1939). Nootka Texts: Tales and ethnological narratives, with grammatical notes and lexical materials. Philadelphia: Linguistic Society of America. ISBN 0404118933. ASIN: B000EB54JC.
• Sapir, Edward (1949). Mandelbaum, David. ed. Selected writings in language, culture and personality. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520011155. ASIN: B000PX25CS
• Sapir, Edward; Irvine, Judith (2002). The psychology of culture: A course of lectures. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3110172829.

Essays and articles

• Sapir, Edward (1907). "Preliminary report on the language and mythology of the Upper Chinook". American Anthropologist (9): 533–544.
• Sapir, Edward (1910). "Some fundamental characteristics of the Ute language". Science (31): 350–352.
• Sapir, Edward (1911). "Some aspects of Nootka language and culture". American Anthropologist (13): 15–28.
• Sapir, Edward (1911). "The problem of noun incorporation in American languages". American Anthropologist (13): 250–282.
• Sapir, Edward (1915). "The Na-dene languages: a preliminary report". American Anthropologist (17): 765–773.
• Sapir, Edward (1917). "Do we need a superorganic?". American Anthropologist (19): 441–447.
• Sapir, Edward (1924). "The grammarian and his language". The American Mercury (1): 149–155.
• Sapir, Edward (1924). "Culture, Genuine and Spurious". The American Journal of Sociology 29 (4): 401–429. doi:10.1086/213616.
• Sapir, Edward (1925). "Memorandum on the problem of an international auxiliary language". The Romanic Review (16): 244–256.
• Sapir, Edward (1925). "Sound patterns in language". Language (1): 37–51.
• Sapir, Edward (1931). "The function of an international auxiliary language". Psyche (11): 4–15. Archived from the original on 2009-10-28. http://web.archive.org/web/20091028180701/http://geocities.com/Athens/Forum/5037/sapir.html.
• Sapir, Edward (1936). "Internal linguistic evidence suggestive of the Northern origin of the Navaho". American Anthropologist (38): 224–235.
• Sapir, Edward (1944). "Grading: a study in semantics". Philosophy of Science (11): 93–116.
• Sapir, Edward (1947). "The relation of American Indian linguistics to general linguistics". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology (1): 1–4.

Bibliographies

• Koerner, E. F. K.; Koerner, Konrad (1985). Edward Sapir: Appraisals of his life and work. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 978-9027245182.
• Cowan, William; Foster, Michael K.; Koerner, Konrad (1986). New perspectives in language, culture, and personality: Proceedings of the Edward Sapir Centenary Conference (Ottawa, 1–3 October 1984). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 9027245223.
• Darnell, Regna (1989). Edward Sapir: linguist, anthropologist, humanist. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520066786.
• Sapir, Edward; Bright, William (1992). Southern Paiute and Ute: linguistics and ethnography. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3110135435.
• Sapir, Edward; Darnell, Regna; Irvine, Judith T.; Handler, Richard (1999). The collected works of Edward Sapir: culture. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3110126396.

Correspondence

• Sapir, Edward; Alfred L. Kroeber, Victor Golla (ed.) (1984). "The Sapir–Kroeber correspondence: Letters between Edward Sapir and A.L. Kroeber 1905–1925". Reports from the Survey of California and other Indian languages 6: 1–509. http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~survey/documents/survey-reports/survey-report-6.pdf.

References

1. ^ Reported by Regna Darnell, Sapir's biographer (p.c. to Bruce Nevin).
2. ^ Sapir, Edward (1933). "La réalité psychologique des phonèmes (The psychological reality of phonemes)" (in French). Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique.
3. ^ F. Peter Gopsill. International languages: A matter for Interlingua. British Interlingua Society, 1990.
4. ^ Falk, Julia S. "Words without grammar: Linguists and the international language movement in the United States, Language and Communication, 15(3): pp. 241–259. Pergamon, 1995.

External links

• National Academy of Sciences biography
• Edward Sapir Collection at Bartleby.com at www.bartleby.com
• Robert Throop and Lloyd Gordon Ward: Mead Project 2.0 at spartan.ac.brocku.ca
• http://www.yale.edu/linguist/Sapir.html
• Edward Sapir at www.mnsu.edu
• Interlingua: Communication Sin Frontiera. Biographia, Edward Sapir
• Works by Edward Sapir at Project Gutenberg

Categories: 1884 births | 1939 deaths | People from Lębork | German Jews | People from the Province of Pomerania | American people of German-Jewish descent | German immigrants to the United States | American scientists of German descent | Jewish American social scientists | American anthropologists | American linguists | Linguists of Yiddish | Anthropological linguists | Interlingua | Columbia University alumni | University of Chicago faculty | Yale University faculty | National Historic Persons of Canada

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