Sapir biography

Edward Sapir, most widely known for his contributions to the study of North American Indian languages, was one of the dominant American linguists and anthropologists of his era.

Not merely a founder of ethnolinguistics, which considers the study of relations between linguistics and nonlinguistic cultural behavior, he was also a key developer of the American school of structural linguistics.

Early Life andEducation:

Sapir was born in Pomerania, Germany, and was five years old when his family emigrated to the United States. He was soon recognized as a gifted schoolboy in New York City.

He was awarded scholarships to the Horace Mann School and then a Pulitzer fellowship to Columbia College, from which he was graduated in

As a student at Columbia, where he worked with Franz Boas, he received a Master’s in Germanics and a PhD () on The Takelma language of  Southwestern Oregon.

He mainly pursued linguistic anthropology under the guidance of Boas who had highlighted the great potentialities of the anthropological study of language.

Contributions and Achievements:

In Sapir became the chief of the anthropology division in the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa. Fifteen years of service in that position provided him with great opportunities for field research and writing, however he was relatively isolated from the main centers of anthropological work.

Therefore, before accepting the offer of a Sterling Professorship at Yale in , he willingly joined the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he continued to do fieldwork on languages including Navajo and Hupa.

At Yale, he played an effective role mentoring a number of students, including Stanley Newman, Morris Swadesh, Mary Haas and Benjamin Whorf. Sapir’s active years ended with his death in after a series of heart attacks.

Sapir proposed that human being’s principal perception of the world is through language. Many of his articles address the relationship between language and

American linguist and anthropologist (–)

Edward Sapir (; January 26, – February 4, ) 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 GermanPomerania, in what is now northern Poland. His family emigrated to the United States of America when he was a child. He studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where he came under the influence of Franz Boas, who inspired him to work on Native American languages. While finishing his Ph.D. he went to California to work with Alfred Kroeber documenting the indigenous languages there. He was employed by the Geological Survey of Canada for fifteen years, where he came into his own as one of the most significant linguists in North America, the other being Leonard Bloomfield. He was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago, and stayed for several years continuing to work for the professionalization of the discipline of linguistics. By the end of his life he was professor of anthropology at Yale. Among his many students were th

Introduction

Preface

1 - The Early Years

&#; Columbia University

&#; The Undergraduate Years

&#; The Graduate Years

2 - Apprenticeship

&#; California

&#; The University of Pennsylvania

&#; False Starts

3 - Ottawa: Maturity and Independence

&#; Organizing Anthropological Research in Canada

&#; Public Affairs

&#; The Tribulations of Museum Anthropology

4 - The Ottawa Research Team

&#; Sapir's Ottawa Fieldwork

&#; Ishi: A Brief Return to California

&#; World War I and Its Aftermath

5 - Synthesizing the Boasian Paradigm

&#; The Phonetics Report

&#; Time Perspective

&#; Language: The Public Statement

6 - The Classification of American Indian Languages

&#; The Beginnings of the Classificatory Mania

&#; The Radin Fiasco

&#; The Six-Unit Classification

&#; The Indo-Chinese Hypothesis

7 - Reorientation toward Psychology

&#; Family and Personal Problems

&#; Early Contacts with Psychology

&#; Kroeber: Psychoanalysis and the Superorganic

8 - Experiments in Aesthetics

&#; Music

&#; An Experiment with the Aesthetics of Design

&#; Poetry

&#; Ottawa Intellectual and Social Life

&#; The Effects of War

9 - Psychologizing Boasian Anthropology

&#; Ruth Benedict

&#; Margaret Mead

10 - Escape from Ottawa

&#; Boasian Machinations at Columbia

&#; Sapir's Appointment at Chicago

&#; The Continued Lure of Columbia

11 - The University of Chicago: A New Start

&#; The University of Chicago

&#; Chicago Sociology

&#; Sapir and the Chicago Sociologists

&#; Rockefeller Foundation Funding in Chicago

12 - Chicago Anthropology

&#; The Anthropological Fiefdom

&#; Sapir's Teaching at Chicago

13 - Sapir's Commitment to Athabaskan

&#; Collaboration with Father Berard Haile

&#; The Southwest Laboratory of Anthropology

&#; Publishing Navajo Texts

&#; The Bureau of Indian Affairs

14 - The Professionalization of Linguistics

&#; The Linguistic Society of America

&#; The Linguistic Institutes

&#; Leonard Bloomfield

&#; IALA and Engli