Edward Sapir

Edward Sapir (pronounced /səˈpiɹ/), (January 26 1884 – 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 and work

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, to which he returned briefly in 1911 to work with Ishi, the monolingual last surviving speaker of Yahi (southern Yana).

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. It appears (Darnell 268-272) that they were congenial but not close. From 1931 to his death Sapir was at Yale University, where he became the head of the Department of Anthropology.

He 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.

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

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.

Books

(ed.) Wishram Texts (1909)
Language: An introduction to the study of speech (1921) ISBN 0-15-648233-9 (another link)
with: M. Swadesh. Nootka texts: Tales and Ethnological Narratives with Grammatical Notes and Lexical Materials. William Dwight Whitney Linguistic Series. Philadelphia: Linguistic Society of America 1939
David G. Mandelbaum (ed.) Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality. Berkeley: University of California Press 1949. ISBN 0-520-01115-5.

Essays and articles

The Function of an International Auxiliary Language (First published in Romanic Review, July 1925. Also published in H. N. Shenton, E. Sapir and O. Jespersen, International Communication: A Symposium on the Language Problem, London 1931, pp. 65-94.)
The problem of noun incorporation in American languages. Am. Anthropol. 13:250-82. (1911)
Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture: A Study in Method. Canada Department of Mines, Geological Survey, Memoir 90. Anthropological Series, No. 13. (1916)
"Sound patterns in language", in: Language 1 (1925), pp. 37-51 [= Selected Writings, pp. 33-45]
"The grammarian and his language", in: American Mercury 1 (1924), pp. 149-155 [= Selected Writings, pp. 150-159]
"La réalité psychologique des phonèmes" [The psychological reality of phonemes], in: Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique 30 (1933), pp. 247-265 [= Selected Writings, pp. 46-60]
"Grading, a study in Semantics", in: Philosophy of Science 11/2 (Apr. 1944), pp. 93-116 [= Selected Writings, pp. 122-149]

Bibliography

Edward Sapir: Appraisals of His Life and Work. Ed. Konrad Koerner. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1984. A collection of obituaries, bibliographic sketches, and critiques (mostly positive) of Sapir's work by his colleagues, students, and others affected by his work.
The Collected Works of Edward Sapir. Ed. William Bright. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990. Volume IV presents more of his anthropological work, and makes reference to his work with Fang-Kuei Li. Volumes V and VI contain his work on American Indian languages.
Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist. Regna Darnell. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. Darnell's book is the best source on Sapir's life and his work as an anthropologist.
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, 1992. The most comprehensive overview of research into linguistic relativity.
New perspectives in language, culture, and personality: Proceedings of the Edward Sapir Centenary Conference (Ottawa, 1-3 October 1984). Ed. William Cowan, Michael K. Foster, Konrad Koerner. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1986).
Edward Sapir and Athabaskan linguistics, with preliminary annotated bibliography of Sapir's work on Athabaskan and Na-Dene. Michael E. Krauss. In W. Cowan, M. K. Foster, & K. Koerner 1986).

External links

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