Edward Sapir

Edward Sapir (born January 26, 1884 – died February 4, 1939) was an American anthropologist-linguist, a leader in American structural linguistics, and one of the creators of what is now called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He is arguably the most influential figure in American linguistics, influencing even Noam Chomsky.

Life

Edward Sapir was born in Lauenburg, Germany, (now Lębork in Poland), in 1884 to an orthodox Jewish family. In 1904 he graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Germanics, but his linguistic interests proved to be much broader. In the next two years he took up projects studying the Wishram and Takelma languages in the field. While at Columbia he met his mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas, who was probably the person who provided the most initial impetus for Sapir's study of American languages. He arranged Sapir's employment in 1907-08 researching the nearly extinct Yana language of northern California. In 1911 Sapir continued to work with Ishi, the monolingual last surviving speaker of Yahi (southern Yana) language.

In the years 1910-1925 he built and directed the Anthropological Division in the Geological Survey of Canada, in Ottawa. When he was first hired, he and Marius Barbeau were the only two, and the first two, full-time anthropologists in Canada. Among the many accomplishments of this very productive period are a substantial series of publications on Nootka and other languages, and his seminal book Language (1921), still important today and eminently readable. As he was leaving for a teaching position at the University of Chicago, one of very few research universities then in the United States, he enabled Leonard Bloomfield to obtain support from Ottawa to do fieldwork on Cree, essential to his project of historical reconstruction in Algonkian. Bloomfield moved to Chicago in 1927 to teach Germanic languages. From 1931 to his death Sapir was at Yale University, where he became the head of the Department of Anthropology.

Sapir died of heart problems in 1939, at age 55.

Work

His special focus among American languages was in the Athabaskan languages, a family he was especially fascinated by: "Dene is probably the son-of-a-bitchiest language in America to actually know...most fascinating of all languages ever invented" (Krauss 1986:157). Among the languages and cultures studied by Sapir are Wishram Chinook, Navajo, Nootka, Paiute, Takelma, and Yana. Although noted for his work on American linguistics, he was also prolific in linguistics in general, as depicted by his book Language, which provides everything from a grammar-typological classification of languages (with examples ranging from Chinese to Nootka) to speculation on the phenomenon on language drift and the arbitrariness of associations between language, race, and culture. He was also at least a minor participant in the international auxiliary language movement; in his paper The Function of an International Auxiliary Language, Sapir 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.

Legacy

Sapir was one of the first who explored the relations between language studies and anthropology. His students include Fang-kuei Li, Benjamin Whorf, Mary Haas, and Harry Hoijer, but it was one not formally his student who he came to regard as his intellectual heir, a young Semiticist named Zellig Harris (who for a time dated his daughter).

Some suggestions of Sapir about the influence of language on the ways in which people think were adopted and developed by Whorf, initially while he was substitute teaching in the classroom during Sapir's illness. It was felt that stimulating and challenging ideas would attract students to this fledgling field. During the 1940s and later this became known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Some support may be found in late work of Harris.

Bibliography

• Sapir, Edward. 1911. The problem of noun incorporation in American languages. American Anthropology. 13, 250-82

• Sapir, Edward. 1916. Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture: A Study in Method. Canada Department of Mines, Geological Survey, Memoir 90. Anthropological Series, 13.

• Sapir, Edward. 1924. The grammarian and his language. American Mercury, 1, 149-155.

• Sapir, Edward. 1925. The Function of an International Auxiliary Language. Romanic Review, July 1925.

• Sapir, Edward. 1925. Sound patterns in language. Language, 1, 37-51

• Sapir, Edward. 1933. La réalité psychologique des phonèmes [The psychological reality of phonemes]. Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, 30, 247-265

• Sapir, Edward. 1944. Grading, a study in Semantics. Philosophy of Science, 11(2), 93-116

• Sapir, Edward. 1955. (original published in 1921). Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. Harvest Books. ISBN 015-648-2339

• Sapir, Edward (Ed.). 1974. (original published in 1939). Nootka texts: Tales and Ethnological Narratives with Grammatical Notes and Lexical Materials. AMS Press Inc. ISBN 0404118933

• Sapir, Edward. 1974. (original published in 1909). Wishram Texts. AMS Press Inc. ISBN 0404581528

• Sapir, Edward; Darnell, Regna; Irvine, Judith T.; & Handler, Richard (Eds.). 1999. The Collected Works of Edward Sapir: Culture. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3110126397

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Koerner, Konrad & E. F. K. Koerner. (Eds.). 1985. Edward Sapir: Appraisals of His Life and Work. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ISBN 9027245185

• Mandelbaum, David G. (Ed.). 1986. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-01115-5.

• Darnell Regna. 1989. Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist.. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0520066782

• Lucy, John Arthur. 1992. Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language, No. 12). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521387973

• Cowan, William & Foster, Michael K. (Eds.). 1986. New perspectives in language, culture, and personality. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 9027245223

• Michael E. Krauss. 1986. Edward Sapir and Athabaskan linguistics, with preliminary annotated bibliography of Sapir's work on Athabaskan and Na-Dene. In W. Cowan, M. K. Foster, & K. Koerner, New perspectives in language, culture, and personality. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 9027245223

External links

• Language: An introduction to the study of speech – Full text

• Biography of E. Sapir - National Academy of Sciences

• E. Sapir – Short biography

• Selected works – Some full texts articles by Sapir

• Edward Sapir: Biography – Biography

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