66 Facts About Edward Sapir

Edward Sapir 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.

Edward Sapir's family emigrated to the United States of America when he was a child.

Edward Sapir studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where he came under the influence of Franz Boas, who inspired him to work on Native American languages.

Edward Sapir 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.

Edward Sapir 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.

Edward Sapir studied the ways in which language and culture influence each other, and he was interested in the relation between linguistic differences, and differences in cultural world views.

Edward Sapir played an important role in developing the modern concept of the phoneme, greatly advancing the understanding of phonology.

Edward Sapir was the first to prove that the methods of comparative linguistics were equally valid when applied to indigenous languages.

Edward Sapir was the first to produce evidence for the classification of the Algic, Uto-Aztecan, and Na-Dene languages.

Edward Sapir proposed some language families that are not considered to have been adequately demonstrated, but which continue to generate investigation such as Hokan and Penutian.

Edward Sapir specialized in the study of Athabascan languages, Chinookan languages, and Uto-Aztecan languages, producing important grammatical descriptions of Takelma, Wishram, Southern Paiute.

Edward Sapir was born into a family of Lithuanian Jews in Lauenburg in the Province of Pomerania where his father, Jacob David Edward Sapir, worked as a cantor.

The Edward Sapir family did not stay long in Pomerania and never accepted German as a nationality.

Edward Sapir's father had difficulty keeping a job in a synagogue and finally settled in New York on the Lower East Side, where the family lived in poverty.

At age 14 Edward Sapir won a Pulitzer scholarship to the prestigious Horace Mann high school, but he chose not to attend the school which he found too posh, going instead to DeWitt Clinton High School, and saving the scholarship money for his college education.

Edward Sapir entered Columbia in 1901, still paying with the Pulitzer scholarship.

Edward Sapir emphasized language study in his college years at Columbia, studying Latin, Greek, and French for eight semesters.

Edward Sapir took courses in Sanskrit, and complemented his language studies by studying music in the department of the famous composer Edward MacDowell.

Edward Sapir enrolled in an advanced anthropology seminar taught by Franz Boas, a course that would completely change the direction of his career.

Edward Sapir's 1905 Master's thesis was an analysis of Johann Gottfried Herder's Treatise on the Origin of Language, and included examples from Inuit and Native American languages, not at all familiar to a Germanicist.

Edward Sapir maintained his Indo-European studies with courses in Celtic, Old Saxon, Swedish, and Sanskrit.

Edward Sapir gathered a volume of Wishram texts, published 1909, and he managed to achieve a much more sophisticated understanding of the Chinook sound system than Boas.

Edward Sapir worked first with Betty Brown, one of the language's few remaining speakers.

Edward Sapir described the way in which the Yana language distinguishes grammatically and lexically between the speech of men and women.

The collaboration between Kroeber and Edward Sapir was made difficult by the fact that Edward Sapir largely followed his own interest in detailed linguistic description, ignoring the administrative pressures to which Kroeber was subject, among them the need for a speedy completion and a focus on the broader classification issues.

Edward Sapir ended up leaving California early to take up a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught Ethnology and American Linguistics.

Also in the summer of 1909, Sapir went to Utah with his student J Alden Mason.

Tillohash's strong intuition about the sound patterns of his language led Edward Sapir to propose that the phoneme is not just an abstraction existing at the structural level of language, but in fact has psychological reality for speakers.

Tillohash became a good friend of Edward Sapir, and visited him at his home in New York and Philadelphia.

Edward Sapir worked with his father to transcribe a number of Southern Paiute songs that Tillohash knew.

At Pennsylvania, Edward Sapir was urged to work at a quicker pace than he felt comfortable.

Boas kept working to secure a stable appointment for his student, and by his recommendation Edward Sapir ended up being hired by the Canadian Geological Survey, who wanted him to lead the institutionalization of anthropology in Canada.

Edward Sapir brought his parents with him to Ottawa, and quickly established his own family, marrying Florence Delson, who had Lithuanian Jewish roots.

Edward Sapir insisted that the discipline of linguistics was of integral importance for ethnographic description, arguing that just as nobody would dream of discussing the history of the Catholic Church without knowing Latin or study German folksongs without knowing German, so it made little sense to approach the study of Indigenous folklore without knowledge of the indigenous languages.

Edward Sapir explicitly used the standard of documentation of European languages, to argue that the amassing knowledge of indigenous languages was of paramount importance.

Unsatisfied with efforts by amateur and governmental anthropologists, Edward Sapir worked to introduce an academic program of anthropology at one of the major universities, in order to professionalize the discipline.

Edward Sapir enlisted the assistance of fellow Boasians: Frank Speck, Paul Radin and Alexander Goldenweiser, who with Barbeau worked on the peoples of the Eastern Woodlands: the Ojibwa, the Iroquois, the Huron and the Wyandot.

Edward Sapir initiated work on the Athabascan languages of the Mackenzie valley and the Yukon, but it proved too difficult to find adequate assistance, and he concentrated mainly on Nootka and the languages of the North West Coast.

In 1915 Edward Sapir returned to California, where his expertise on the Yana language made him urgently needed.

Edward Sapir had been adopted by the Kroebers, but had fallen ill with tuberculosis, and was not expected to live long.

Sam Batwi, the speaker of Yana who had worked with Edward Sapir, was unable to understand the Yahi variety, and Krober was convinced that only Edward Sapir would be able to communicate with Ishi.

Edward Sapir traveled to San Francisco and worked with Ishi over the summer of 1915, having to invent new methods for working with a monolingual speaker.

Edward Sapir continued work on Athabascan, working with two speakers of the Alaskan languages Kutchin and Ingalik.

Edward Sapir was now more preoccupied with testing hypotheses about historical relationships between the Na-Dene languages than with documenting endangered languages, in effect becoming a theoretician.

Edward Sapir was growing to feel isolated from his American colleagues.

The Sapir household was largely run by Eva Sapir, who did not get along well with Florence, and this added to the strain on both Florence and Edward.

Sapir's parents had by now divorced and his father seemed to develop psychosis, which made it necessary for him to leave Canada for Philadelphia, where Edward continued to support him financially.

Florence was hospitalized for long periods both for her depressions and for the lung abscess, and she died in 1924 due to an infection following surgery, providing the final incentive for Edward Sapir to leave Canada.

Edward Sapir participated in the formulation of a report to the American Anthropological Association regarding the standardization of orthographic principles for writing Indigenous languages.

Edward Sapir initially wrote to Benedict to commend her for her dissertation on "The Guardian Spirit", but soon realized that Benedict had published poetry pseudonymously.

However, Edward Sapir often showed little understanding for Benedict's private thoughts and feelings, and particularly his conservative gender ideology jarred with Benedict's struggles as a female professional academic.

Edward Sapir socialized with intellectuals, gave lectures, participated in poetry and music clubs.

The Edward Sapir household continued to be managed largely by Grandmother Eva, until Edward Sapir remarried in 1926.

Edward Sapir had first met Sapir when a student in Ottawa, but had since come to work at the University of Chicago's department of Juvenile Research.

Edward Sapir exerted influence through his membership in the Chicago School of Sociology, and his friendship with psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan.

From 1931 until his death in 1939, Edward Sapir taught at Yale University, where he became the head of the Department of Anthropology.

Edward Sapir was invited to Yale to found an interdisciplinary program combining anthropology, linguistics and psychology, aimed at studying "the impact of culture on personality".

Edward Sapir never thrived at Yale, where as one of only four Jewish faculty members out of 569 he was denied membership to the faculty club where the senior faculty discussed academic business.

Edward Sapir came to regard a young Semiticist named Zellig Harris as his intellectual heir, although Harris was never a formal student of Edward Sapir.

Edward Sapir argued that her research should be funded instead of the more sociological work of John Dollard.

Edward Sapir eventually lost the discussion and Powdermaker had to leave Yale.

Edward Sapir's anthropological thought has been described as isolated within the field of anthropology in his own days.

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

Edward Sapir was the first Research Director of the International Auxiliary Language Association, which presented the Interlingua conference in 1951.

Edward Sapir directed the Association from 1930 to 1931, and was a member of its Consultative Counsel for Linguistic Research from 1927 to 1938.

Edward Sapir consulted with Alice Vanderbilt Morris to develop the research program of IALA.