edward sapir culture language and personality

His students include Fang-kuei Li, Benjamin Whorf, Mary Haas, and Harry Hoijer, but it was one not formally his student who he came to regard as his intellectual heir, a young Semiticist named Zellig Harris (who for a time dated his daughter).

He was one of the first who explored the relations between language studies and anthropology. From 1931 to his death Sapir was at Yale University, where he became the head of the Department of Anthropology. It appears (Darnell 268-272) that they were congenial but not close. Bloomfield moved to Chicago in 1927 to teach Germanic languages. As he was leaving for a teaching position at the University of Chicago, one of very few research universities then in the United States, he enabled Leonard Bloomfield to obtain support from Ottawa to do fieldwork on Cree, essential to his project of historical reconstruction in Algonkian. Among the many accomplishments of this very productive period are a substantial series of publications on Nootka and other languages, and his seminal book Language (1921), still important today and eminently readable. When he was first hired, he and Marius Barbeau were the only two, and the first two, full-time anthropologists in Canada. In the years 1910-1925 he built and directed the Anthropological Division in the Geological Survey of Canada, in Ottawa.

He arranged Sapir's employment in 1907-08 researching the nearly extinct Yana language of northern California, to which he returned briefly in 1915 to work with Ishi, the monolingual last surviving speaker of Yahi (southern Yana). While a graduate student at Columbia he met his mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas, who was probably the person who provided the most initial impetus for Sapir's study of indigenous languages of the Americas. In the next two years he took up studies of the Wishram and Takelma languages of Southwestern Oregon, and received his Ph.D. ( 1905) in Germanic philology from Columbia College of Columbia University but his linguistic interests proved to be much broader. Sapir was born in Lauenburg in Pomerania to an orthodox Jewish family.

Edward sapir culture language and personality