Edward Sapir

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Edward Sapir : biography

26 January 1884 – 4 February 1939

At Yale, Sapirs graduate students included Morris Swadesh, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Mary Haas, Charles Hockett and Harry Hoijer, Fang-kuei Liseveral of whom he brought with him from Chicago.Haas, M. R. (1953), Sapir and the Training of Anthropological Linguists. American Anthropologist, 55: 447–450. 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.)Reported by Regna Darnell, Sapir’s biographer (p.c. to Bruce Nevin). 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 argued that her research should be funded instead of the more sociological work of John Dollard. 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, he began having problems with a heart condition that had initially been diagnosed a couple of years earlier.Morris Swadesh. 1939. "Edward Sapir" Language Vol. 15, No. 2 (Apr. – Jun., 1939), pp. 132-135 In 1938 had to take a leave from Yale, during which his student and friend Benjamin Lee Whorf taught his courses, and G. P. Murdock advised some of his . After Sapir’s death in 1939, G. P. Murdock became the chair of the anthropology department. Murdock who depised the Boasian paradigm of cultural anthropology dismantled most of Sapirs efforts to integrate anthropology, psychology, linguistics.Darnell, R. (1998), Camelot at Yale: The Construction and Dismantling of the Sapirian Synthesis, 1931-39. American Anthropologist, 100: 361–372.

Main contributions

Classification of Native American languages

Linguistic theory

Anthropological thought

Sapir’s anthropological thought has been described as isolated within the field of anthropology in his own days. Instead of searching for the ways in which culture influences human behavior, Sapir was interested in understanding how cultural patterns themselves was shaped by the composition of individual personalities that make up a society. This made Sapir cultivate an interest in individual psychology and his view of culture was more psychological than many of his contemporaries.Moore 2009Richard J. Preston. 1966. Edward Sapir’s Anthropology: Style, Structure, and Method. American Anthropologist , New Series, Vol. 68, No. 5, pp. 1105-1128 It has been suggested that there is a close relation between Sapir’s literary interests and his anthropological thought. His literary theory saw individual aesthetic sensibilities and creativity to interact with learned cultural traditions to produce unique and new poetic forms, echoing the way that he also saw individuals and cultural patterns to dialectically influence each other.Richard Handler. 1984. Sapir’s Poetic Experience. American Anthropologist , New Series, Vol. 86, No. 2, pp. 416-417

Breadth of languages studied

Sapir’s special focus among American languages was in the Athabaskan languages, a family which especially fascinated him. In a private letter, he wrote: "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.

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,Malkiel, Yakov. 1981. Drift, Slope, and Slant: Background of, and Variations upon, a Sapirian Theme. Language, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Sep., 1981), pp. 535-570 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.Gopsill, F. Peter. International Languages: a matter for Interlingua. British Interlingua Society, 1990. Sapir consulted with Alice Vanderbilt Morris to develop the research program of IALA.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.

Selected publications

Books

Essays and articles

Biographies

Correspondence