1. Mary Rosamond Haas was an American linguist who specialized in North American Indigenous languages, Thai, and historical linguistics.
20 Facts About Mary Haas
1. 2.
Mary Haas served as president of the Linguistic Society of America.
3.
Mary Haas was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
4.
Mary Haas attended high school and Earlham College in Richmond.
5.
Mary Haas completed her PhD in linguistics at Yale University in 1935 at the age of 25, with a dissertation titled A Grammar of the Tunica Language.
6.
Mary Haas undertook graduate work on comparative philology at the University of Chicago.
7.
Mary Haas studied under Edward Sapir, whom she would follow to Yale.
8.
Mary Haas began a long career in linguistic fieldwork by studying various languages during the summer months.
9.
Mary Haas's first published paper, A Visit to the Other World, a Nitinat Text, written in collaboration with Morris Swadesh, was published in 1933.
10.
Shortly after, Mary Haas conducted fieldwork with Watt Sam and Nancy Raven, the last two native speakers of the Natchez language in Oklahoma.
11.
Mary Haas conducted extensive fieldwork on the Creek language, and was the first modern linguist to collect extensive texts in the language.
12.
Mary Haas became one of the founding members of the UC-Berkeley Department of Linguistics when it was established in 1953.
13.
Mary Haas was a long-term chair of the department, and she was Director of the Survey of California Indian Languages at Berkeley from 1953 to 1977.
14.
Mary Haas retired from Berkeley in 1977 and in 1984 was elected a Berkeley Fellow.
15.
Mary Haas died at her home in Berkeley, California, on May 17,1996, at the age of 86.
16.
Mary Haas was noted for her dedication to teaching linguistics, and to the role of the linguist in language instruction.
17.
Mary Haas married Morris Swadesh, a fellow linguist, in 1931.
18.
In 1963, Mary Haas served as president of the Linguistic Society of America.
19.
Mary Haas was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974, and she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978.
20.
Mary Haas received honorary doctorates from Northwestern University in 1975, the University of Chicago in 1976, Earlham College, 1980, and the Ohio State University in 1980.