Mary Haas

Mary Rosamund Haas (January 12, 1910, Richmond, Indiana - d. May 17, 1996) was an American linguist who specialized in North American Indian languages, Thai, and historical linguistics.

Haas attended high school in Richmond, Indiana, and later Earlham College.

At the University of Chicago she undertook graduate work on comparative philology. Her first published paper, A Visit to the Other World, a Nitinat Text, a collaboration with Morris Swadesh (to whom she would later be married for a time), was published in 1933.

She went on to complete her Ph.D. in linguistics from Yale University in 1935 with a dissertation entitled A Grammar of the Tunica Language. (Tunica was a language once spoken in present-day Louisiana.) Haas worked with the last fluent speaker of Tunica, Sesostrie Youchigant, producing extensive texts and vocabularies.

Shortly afterwards, she conducted fieldwork with the last two speakers of the Natchez language in Oklahoma, Watt Sam and Nancy Raven, resulting in extensive unpublished field notes that constitute the most reliable source of information on the language. Shortly after this, she conducted extensive fieldwork on the Creek language as well, and was the first modern linguist to collect extensive texts in the language. Most of her notes on Creek and Natchez remain unpublished, though they have begun to be used by contemporary linguists.

Haas was noted for her dedication to teaching linguistics, and to the role of the linguist in language instruction. Her student Karl V. Teeter pointed out in his obituary of Haas^[1] that she trained more Americanist linguists than her former instructors Edward Sapir and Franz Boas combined: she supervised fieldwork in Americanist linguistics by more than 100 Ph.D. students.

During World War II, the study and teaching of Southeast Asian languages was considered by the Allies to be important to the war effort^[2], so under the auspices of the Army Specialized Training Program at the University of California at Berkeley, Haas developed a program to teach the Thai language.^[3] Her authoritative Thai-English Students' Dictionary, published in 1964, is still in use.

She served as President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1963.

She died on May 17, 1996 in Alameda County, California, aged 86.

External links

• Electronic version of Haas and Subhanka's Spoken Thai
• Obituary at Sealang Library
• Obituary by linguist Kenneth Pike
• Concise Encyclopedia Britannica entry

References