Edward Sapir

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Edward Sapir

(born Jan. 26, 1884, Lauenburg, Pomerania, Ger. — died Feb. 4, 1939, New Haven, Conn., U.S.) Polish-born U.S. linguist and anthropologist. He was a founder of ethnolinguistics, which considers the relationship of culture to language, and a principal developer of the American (descriptive) school of structural linguistics. He became widely known for his contributions to the study of American Indian languages. His best-known work is Language (1921).

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Edward Sapir (1884-1939) was a distinguished American linguist and anthropologist who developed a basic statement on the genetic relationship of Native American languages and pioneered in modern theoretical linguistics.

Edward Sapir was born in Lauenburg, Germany, on Jan. 26, 1884, and emigrated in his early childhood to the United States, first living in Richmond, Va., and then moving to New York City, where he spent the greater part of his youth. As a student at Columbia University, he first studied Germanics, but under the influence of Franz Boas, the founder of modern American anthropology, Sapir switched to anthropology and linguistics. His main contributions concerned Native American, Indo-European, and general linguistics; American Indian and general anthropology; and what has come to be called culture and personality, or psychological anthropology. Beyond these scientific pursuits Sapir also made numerous contributions to American letters by publishing reviews and poems in such journals as Poetry, the Dial, Freeman, and the Nation.

Study of Native American Languages

Upon receiving a doctorate at Columbia, Sapir obtained his first important position, as head of the division of anthropology at the Canadian National Museum in Ottawa, in 1910. During the 15 years spent in Canada, Sapir studied the Native American languages of western Canada. This work, coupled with previous studies in the United States of Takelma, Chinook, Yana, and Paiute, permitted Sapir, in collaboration with his colleagues, to simplify and considerably clarify the earlier genetic classification of American languages.

Two important works were published during the Canadian years. The first, Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture: A Study in Method (1916), was a succinct account of the techniques available to ethnographers for the reconstruction, in the absence of written sources, of culture history. This short monograph represented a position paper, one of a number produced in those years by Franz Boas and his students, in counter-statement to the rather facile historiography promulgated by the various schools of evolutionary determinism that had been current from the 19th century until well into the first decades of the 20th.

The second work, Sapir's only full-length book, was an introduction to scientific linguistics Language (1921) - in which with great brilliance he delineated the full range of what the study of language, both structure and history, entails. Language included a discussion of phonetics as it was practiced at that time and a particularly subtle grammatical typology that took into account the great diversity of natural languages. In this book he also introduced the concept of linguistic drift, a theory arguing that grammatical change in language is never random but, rather, the result of certain systematic trends followed through in the course of a language or language family's history. He took as his main example the drift apparent in many Indo-European languages away from complex case systems in favor of syntactic position; that is, the grammatical function of a word tends to be indicated less by inflection than by its position in the overall sentence.

Linguistic and Cultural Theory

In 1925 Sapir accepted a teaching position in the newly created department of anthropology at the University of Chicago. During this period Sapir began publishing his most important papers in linguistic and cultural theory. The ideas and viewpoints set out in these papers had a deep and lasting influence on the subsequent development of linguistics and anthropology.

In "Sound Patterns in Language" (1925) Sapir demonstrated that the sounds of language are not merely physical but also mental or psychological phenomena, in that for all languages any sound is part of a system of discrete contrasts that are altered and combined in ways determined by shared linguistic conventions rather than physical necessity. That the systematic and conventional nature of sounds is available to the intuitions of a native speaker was set out in a paper published a number of years later ("The Psychological Reality of the Phoneme," 1933).

These two papers, especially the first, laid the groundwork for much that was to follow in the field of phonemics (the study of conventionally relevant sounds) and in large measure converged with, and to a certain extent anticipated, similar discoveries made by European linguists who had been working under the inspiration and influence of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.

Recognizing the unconscious reality of both the phonological and grammatical aspects of language led Sapir to argue that culture should be considered as patterns of individually learned conventions (both conscious and unconscious) rather than external facts ("The Unconscious Patterning of Behavior in Society," 1927). That is, in more current phrasing, culture is best defined as learned rules for behaving rather than the results of conventional behavior.

Two other important ideas already implicit in earlier work were succinctly formulated by Sapir during his Chicago years in his short paper "The Status of Linguistics as a Science" (1929). First, language, because of its central place in culture, acts as a "guide to 'social reality"' and to a large extent shapes, if not completely determines, an individual's and a culture's understanding and perception of the "external world," or reality. Second, language, which yields to systematic analysis, can in its study provide tools for the systematic investigation of other, more elusive aspects of culture.

Last Years

In 1931 Sapir was offered and accepted a position at Yale University as Sterling professor of anthropology and linguistics. At Yale he continued refining aspects of his theoretical positions, writing a series of papers on language and various aspects of culture for the Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences. He also, more than previously, devoted time and interest to the relationship between culture and the individual personality, always arguing that both must be taken into account if meaningful statements about one or the other are to be made. The exploratory papers written as a result of these interests had great influence in defining the general subject of culture and personality.

During these last years of his life, Sapir continued to find time for detailed work on particular languages, though at this time his interest shifted (though never completely) away from Native American languages to problems of Indo-European and Semitic linguistics. He died on Feb. 4, 1939.

Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir. Photograph by Florence M. Hendershot, Chicago, Ill.
Born	January 26, 1884(1884-01-26) Lauenburg, Prussia
Died	February 4, 1939 (aged 55) New Haven, CT, United States
Citizenship	American
Fields	Linguistics, Anthropology
Institutions	University of Chicago Columbia University Yale University
Alma mater	Columbia University
Known for	Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
Religious stance	Jewish

Life and work

Sapir was born in Lauenburg in Pomerania to an orthodox Jewish family. His family immigrated to New York in the United States in the late 19th century.

Sapir earned both a B.A. (1904) and an M.A. (1905) in Germanic philology from Columbia. His linguistic interests proved to be much broader.

In the next two years he took up studies of the Wishram and Takelma languages of Native Americans in southwestern Oregon. In 1909 he received his Ph.D. in anthropology, just emerging as a new field of study. While a graduate student at Columbia, Sapir met his mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas. The latter was likely the person who provided the most impetus for Sapir's study of indigenous languages of the Americas.

Boas arranged Sapir's employment in 1907-08 researching the nearly extinct Yana language of northern California. Sapir returned there in 1915 to work with Ishi, the monolingual last surviving speaker of Yahi (southern Yana).

In the years 1910-1925 Sapir established and directed the Anthropological Division in the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa. When he was hired, he and Marius Barbeau were the first full-time anthropologists in Canada.

Among the many accomplishments of this productive period were a series of substantial publications on Nootka and other languages, and his seminal book Language (1921). It is still important today and accessible to educated lay people.

As Sapir left for a teaching position at the University of Chicago, one of the few research universities then in the United States, he enabled Leonard Bloomfield to obtain support from Ottawa to do fieldwork on Cree language. This was essential to Bloomfield's project of historical reconstruction in Algonquian languages.

From 1931 until his death in 1939, Sapir taught at Yale University, where he became the head of the Department of Anthropology. He was one of the first to explore the relations between language studies and anthropology. His students included Fang-kuei Li, Benjamin Whorf, Mary Haas, and Harry Hoijer. 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.)^[1] Sapir also exerted influence through his membership in the Chicago School of Sociology, and his friendship with psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan.

Some of Sapir's suggestions about the influence of language on the ways in which people think were adopted and developed by Whorf. They both believed that stimulating and challenging theories would attract students to this fledgling field. During the 1940s and later, this concept became known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Late work of Harris supported their hypothesis.

Sapir's special focus among American languages was in the Athabaskan languages, a family which especially fascinated him: "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.

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, 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).

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.^[2]

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.^[3] Sapir consulted with Alice Vanderbilt Morris to develop the research program of IALA.^[4]

Selected publications

Books

Sapir, Edward (1907). Herder's "Ursprung der Sprache". Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ASIN: B0006CWB2W.
Sapir, Edward (1908), "On the etymology of Sanskrit asru, Avestan asru, Greek dakru", in Modi, Jivanji Jamshedji, Spiegel memorial volume. Papers on Iranian subjects written by various scholars in honour of the late Dr. Frederic Spiegel, Bombay: British India Press, pp. 156–159
Sapir, Edward; Curtin, Jeremiah (1909). Wishram texts, together with Wasco tales and myths. E.J. Brill. ASIN: B000855RIW. http://www.archive.org/details/wishramtexts00sapirich.
Sapir, Edward (1910). Yana Texts. Berkeley University Press. http://www.archive.org/details/yanatexts00sapirich.
Sapir, Edward (1915). A sketch of the social organization of the Nass River Indians. Ottawa: Government Printing Office. http://www.archive.org/details/sketchofsocialor00sapiiala.
Sapir, Edward (1915). Noun reduplication in Comox, a Salish language of Vancouver island. Ottawa: Government Printing Office. http://www.archive.org/details/nounreduplicatio00sapirich.
Sapir, Edward (1916). Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture, A Study in Method. Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau. http://www.archive.org/details/timeperspectivei00sapirich.
Sapir, Edward (1917). Dreams and Gibes. Boston: The Gorham Press. http://www.archive.org/details/dreamsgibes00sapirich.
Sapir, Edward (1921). Language: An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace and company. ASIN: B000NGWX8I. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12629.
Sapir, Edward; Swadesh, Morris (1939). Nootka Texts: Tales and ethnological narratives, with grammatical notes and lexical materials. Philadelphia: Linguistic Society of America. ASIN: B000EB54JC.
Sapir, Edward (1949), Mandelbaum, David, ed., Selected writings in language, culture and personality, Berkeley: University of California Press, ASIN: B000PX25CS
Sapir, Edward; Irvine, Judith (2002). The psychology of culture: A course of lectures. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3110172829.

Essays and articles

Sapir, Edward (1907). "Preliminary report on the language and mythology of the Upper Chinook". American Anthropologist (9): 533–544.
Sapir, Edward (1910). "Some fundamental characteristics of the Ute language". Science (31): 350–352.
Sapir, Edward (1911). "Some aspects of Nootka language and culture". American Anthropologist (13): 15–28.
Sapir, Edward (1911). "The problem of noun incorporation in American languages". American Anthropologist (13): 250–282.
Sapir, Edward (1915). "The Na-dene languages: a preliminary report". American Anthropologist (17): 765–773.
Sapir, Edward (1917). "Do we need a superorganic?". American Anthropologist (19): 441–447.
Sapir, Edward (1924). "The grammarian and his language". The American Mercury (1): 149–155.
Sapir, Edward (1924). "Culture, Genuine and Spurious". The American Journal of Sociology 29 (4): 401–429. doi:10.1086/213616.
Sapir, Edward (1925). "Memorandum on the problem of an international auxiliary language". The Romanic Review (16): 244–256.
Sapir, Edward (1925). "Sound patterns in language". Language (1): 37–51.
Sapir, Edward (1931). "The function of an international auxiliary language". Psyche (11): 4–15. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/5037/sapir.html.
Sapir, Edward (1936). "Internal linguistic evidence suggestive of the Northern origin of the Navaho". American Anthropologist (38): 224–235.
Sapir, Edward (1944). "Grading: a study in semantics". Philosophy of Science (11): 93–116.
Sapir, Edward (1947). "The relation of American Indian linguistics to general linguistics". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology (1): 1–4.

Bibliographies

Koerner, E. F. K.; Koerner, Konrad (1985). Edward Sapir: Appraisals of his life and work. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 978-9027245182.
Cowan, William; Foster, Michael K.; Koerner, Konrad (1986). New perspectives in language, culture, and personality: Proceedings of the Edward Sapir Centenary Conference (Ottawa, 1-3 October 1984). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Darnell, Regna (1989). Edward Sapir: linguist, anthropologist, humanist. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520066786.
Sapir, Edward; Bright, William (1992). Southern Paiute and Ute: linguistics and ethnography. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3110135435.
Sapir, Edward; Darnell, Regna; Irvine, Judith T.; Handler, Richard (1999). The collected works of Edward Sapir: culture. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3110126396.

References

^ Reported by Regna Darnell, Sapir's biographer (p.c. to Bruce Nevin).
^ Sapir, Edward (1933). "La réalité psychologique des phonèmes (The psychological reality of phonemes)" (in French). Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique.
^ F. Peter Gopsill. International languages: A matter for Interlingua. British Interlingua Society, 1990.
^ 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.

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Edward Sapir

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National Academy of Sciences biography
Edward Sapir Collection at Bartleby.com at www.bartleby.com
Robert Throop and Lloyd Gordon Ward: Mead Project 2.0 at spartan.ac.brocku.ca
http://www.yale.edu/linguist/Sapir.html
Edward Sapir at www.mnsu.edu
Interlingua: Communication Sin Frontiera. Biographia, Edward Sapir
Works by Edward Sapir at Project Gutenberg

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Persondata
NAME	Sapir, Edward
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American linguist and anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH	January 26, 1884(1884-01-26)
PLACE OF BIRTH	Lauenburg, Prussia (now Lębork, Poland)
DATE OF DEATH	February 4, 1939
PLACE OF DEATH	New Haven, Connecticut

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