Parrot Time Magazine

The Thinking of Speaking
Issue #2 March / April 2013
Biographies
Edward Sapir

Edward Sapir

Patterns of Language

Patterns of Language

by Sofia Ozols
March / April 2013 |  asd

Edward Sapir was one of the foremost American linguists and anthropologists of his time, making major contributions to the study of American Indian languages and people as well as ethnolinguistics.

His name is probably most known in association with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. He was a founder of ethnolinguistics, which is the study of the relationship between culture and language. Among anthropologists, he is probably most known for his work in the classification of Native American Indians. During his lifetime, he was a prolific publisher of materials in a few different fields that are still studied today.

His Life

Edward Sapir was born in 1884 in Lauenburg, Germany. His parents were both Lithuanian Jews, and while he learned German as a child, the language in his home was Yiddish. However, since his father, Jacob, preferred music to theology, the family was not strictly orthodox in their religious observance.

The family moved many times during Sapir's early childhood. He started kindergarten in Liverpool, England, then his family emigrated to the United States when he was five and they arrived in Richmond, Virginia in 1890. Tragically, Sapir's younger brother Max died of typhoid shortly afterwards. Then while Jacob's career declined into a series of short-term appointments, the family moved to the Lower East Side of New York City when Edward was ten. Eva Sapir ran a small shop to support herself and young Edward after she and Jacob divorced sometime after 1910.

When he was fourteen, Sapir won a Pulitzer scholarship for four years at Horace Mann High School, which was and still is one of the top college-preparatory high schools in New York, but he turned it down, choosing a local high school instead and using the scholarship for his undergraduate education at Columbia University. After starting at Columbia in 1901, Sapir focused on Germanic philology (the study of literary texts and written records) while getting formal training in Indo-European linguistics. He received a B.A. in German in 1904 after having taken only three years to complete the four-year program, then he received his M.A., also in German, in 1905. He took two more years of courses in anthropology and German, receiving his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1909 with a dissertation on the Takelma language of southwestern Oregon.


Franz Boas

Sapir had a knack for languages, but since Columbia had no true department of linguistics, Germanics was the field of choice for a student interested in linguistic science. While there, Sapir met and began to study with Franz Boas and was inspired into the need to record endangered American Indian languages before they were lost forever. In 1905, Boas sent him to the Yakima Reservation in Washington to do fieldwork on the Wishram dialect of Chinook, and then to Oregon, to work on Takelma. Sapir worked on Takelma and Chasta Costa at Siletz Reservation in Oregon in 1906, then from 1907-1908 he was a research associate in anthropology at the University of California, where he worked on Yana. He spent two years at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia after that, first as a professor and then as an instructor. When Sapir submitted his description of Takelma as a dissertation to Boas at Columbia in 1909, he was awarded a doctorate.


Columbia University in New York in 1915

In 1910, he was hired to head the newly established division of anthropology in the Geological Survey of the Canadian National Museum, and while he was initially excited about this opportunity, he soon became disappointed and complained about the isolation of life in Ottawa. He did fieldwork on a large number of languages, including Nootka and Sarcee, and he published much in a number of areas. His Takelma grammar was published in 1922 in the second volume of the Handbook of American Indian Languages.

While in Ottawa, his first wife suffered a series of mental and physical illnesses from which she finally died. To add to his pain, Sapir's efforts to develop anthropological research on the natives of Canada were largely halted by the financial requirements of the First World War. The money just wasn't available and he became increasingly despondent and isolated. This led Sapir to devote a large amount of his time to poetry and music, as well as the writing of many literary reviews.

Between 1917 and the early 1930s, he was a major contributor to The Dial, which was one of the most important American literary journals at the time. He was also a writer for other journals such as The Freeman, Poetry, The New Republic, The Nation, and others. Many of the topics that he wrote about in his nonacademic writing also appeared in his work in anthropology and he became increasingly interested in questions of psychiatry and the nature of personality, particularly in the relationship between personality and culture.

When In 1925 Sapir was offered a position at the University of Chicago, he accepted happily. There, he had many students and in a short time, he became a major figure in American anthropology. He continued to do fieldwork on several languages, such as Navajo and Hupa, and he had the chance to do many of the things he had missed while in Ottawa. He eagerly joined in interdisciplinary conferences, and had a notable collaboration with international psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan and political scientist Harold D. Lasswell. Since he was teaching in the social sciences, Sapir found himself thinking a lot about culture, psychology and social science methodology. For a while, he continued to write poetry, but the pressure of other work finally left him little time for anything besides his professional obligations. During this period, however, he did not stop his linguistic work, and even managed to make field trips to study Navajo and Hupa.

Shortly after he arrived in Chicago, Sapir renewed a friendship with Jean McClenaghan, now a social work student on a practicum at the Chicago Institute for Juvenile Research, and the couple was married in 1927. They would eventually have two children.

Sapir grew tired of the amount of administrative work required of him at Chicago, and so he accepted a very attractive offer for a Sterling Professorship at Yale in 1931. While at Yale, he again attracted numerous students, including many that had followed him from Chicago.

Many of his plans in Yale were undermined by local academic politics, by the economic effects of the Depression, and by feelings of anti-Semitism at Yale, and Sapir became drained and unhappy. Outside of Yale, he continued with his interdisciplinary activities, while in it he focused on his own teaching in anthropology and linguistics. It was too much.

In 1937, while he was teaching at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Sapir suffered a heart attack. A sabbatical to China in 1937 had to be cancelled because of his health, and while he did he return to teaching in the fall of 1938, he had not recovered his strength. He finally died in 1939 of heart disease at the age of fifty-five.


Southern Paiute indians

Classifying American Indian Languages

Edward Sapir did a lot of work with Native American Indian languages and people, a few of which were on the very brink of extinction. Among the languages and cultures studied by Sapir were:

  • Wishram Chinook - One of the three varieties of Chinookian which is a language used by the Chinook people in Oregon and Washington.

  • Navajo - Also called Navaho. An Athabaskan language spoken in the southwest United States by the Navajo people.

  • Nootka - Also called Nuu-chah-nulth. A Wakashan language spoken in the Pacific Northwest on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada.

  • Paiute - A group of languages belonging to the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan family, spoken by the Paiute people of the western United States.

  • Takelma - Takelma was the language spoken by the Takelma people of southwestern Oregon. The last fluent speaker of Takelma worked with Sapir in writing about the language.

  • Yana - Also called Yanan. An extinct language spoken in north-central California by the Yahi people.

In 1921, Sapir published a single page summary of a six-unit classification of the American Indian languages from his studies. He produced a complete version in 1929 with justifications and a classification of twenty-three units based on his work and that of his colleagues from almost twenty years. He viewed this classification as a series of hypothesis, and while some found it controversial and too bold in some of the combinations, many anthropologists instantly accepted them as a concrete guide to language classification and tribal relationships.

I. Eskimo–Aleut

II. Algonkin–Wakashan

1. Algonkin–Ritwan
(1) Algonkin
(2) Beothuk (?)
(3) Ritwan
(a) Wiyot
(b) Yurok
2. Kootenay
3. Mosan (Wakashan–Salish)
(1) Wakashan (Kwakiutl–Nootka)
(2) Chimakuan
(3) Salish

III. Nadene

1. Haida
2. Continental Nadene
(1) Tlingit
(2) Athabaskan

IV. Penutian

1. Californian Penutian
(1) Miwok-Costanoan
(2) Yokuts
(3) Maidu
(4) Wintun
2. Oregon Penutian
(1) Takelma
(2) Coast Oregon Penutian
(a) Coos
(b) Siuslaw
(c) Yakonan
(3) Kalapuya
3. Chinook
4. Tsimshian
5. Plateau Penutian
(1) Sahaptin
(2) Waiilatpuan (Molala–Cayuse)
(3) Lutuami (Klamath-Modoc)
6. Mexican Penutian
(1) Mixe–Zoque
(2) Huave

V. Hokan–Siouan

1. Hokan–Coahuiltecan
A. Hokan
(1) Northern Hokan
(a) Karok, Chimariko, Shasta–Achomawl
(b) Yana
(c) Pomo
(2) Washo
(3) Esselen–Yuman
(a) Esselen
(b) Yuman
(4) Salinan–Seri
(a) Salinan
(b) Chumash
(c) Seri
(5) Tequistlatecan (Chontal)
B. Subtiaba–Tlappanec
C. Coahuiltecan
(1) Tonkawa
(2) Coahuilteco
(a) Coahuilteco proper
(b) Cotoname
(c) Comecrudo
(3) Karankawa
2. Yuki
3. Keres
4. Tunican
(1) Tunica–Atakapa
(2) Chitimacha
5. Iroquois
(1) Iroquoian
(2) Caddoan
6. Eastern group
(1) Siouan–Yuchi
(a) Siouan
(b) Yuchi
(2) Natchez–Muskogian
(a) Natchez
(b) Muskogian
(c) Timucua (?)

VI. Aztec–Tanoan

1. Uto-Aztekan
(1) Nahuatl
(2) Piman
(3) Shoshonean
2. Tanoan–Kiowa
(1) Tanoan
(2) Kiowa
3. Zuñi (?)

IALA

Sapir was active in the international auxiliary language movement which pushed to create a constructed language that could be used by people all over the world instead of learning each others languages. He published " The Function of an International Auxiliary Language" in which he spoke of the benefits of a regular grammar and pushed for a critical focus on the fundamentals of language without the bias of national language idiosyncrasies while selecting an international auxiliary language. He was also the first Research Director of the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). It was a position he held between 1930 and 1931. Added to all this, he was a member of IALA's Consultative Counsel for Linguistic Research from 1927 to 1938 and consulted with Alice Vanderbilt Morris to develop the research program of IALA.

Phonology

Sapir made a major contribution to linguistic theory with his work in phonology (the study of sound systems). He published his paper "Sound Patterns in Language" in 1925 in the first issue of "Language", the journal of the Linguistic Society of America of which Sapir was a founder. In this, he defined his concept of a phoneme, viewing it in terms of its relationships among sounds rather than its objective qualities. This addressed phonemes as a psychological phenomena and not just the commonly accepted physical aspects. Why this is of importance is that it raises phonemes from being single individual entities to being influenced by other phonemes, not just in one language but across related languages. By looking at these connections, one can see a larger pattern between languages. He continued this pattern argument in 1933 with his paper "The Psychological Reality of the Phoneme" in which he discussed how the the systematic and conventional nature of sounds is understood at an intuitive level by native speakers.


With these two papers, Sapir had laid the groundwork for much that would come in the field of phonemics (the study of conventionally relevant sounds). This new way of viewing phonology helped revolutionize American linguistics. It was derived from Sapir's extensive fieldwork with the American Indian languages, yet paralleled the work being done in Europe on phonomic models by linguistics that were working from the influence of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.

Grammar

Another area of Sapir's work involved carrying on and expanding on the ideas of his one time teacher, Franz Boas, who applied a very scientific method to the study of linguistics and criticized heavily the previous work of fellow anthropologists. In 1916, Sapir published "Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture: A Study in Method" in which he put forth the methods used by Boas to examine the historical connections between culture and language. He also included linguistics examples from a wide range of cases. Essentially, as a culture develops, traces of the past are maintained in the language, so languages played a key role in understanding not just the current culture but how it evolved. Since these changes came through the spoken language, they were usable in the absence of a written language. Furthermore, since the language sounds were traceable across related languages, a connection could be made between different peoples over time. Languages could be used to assist in showing genetic relationships.

Sapir published the only book he completed in his lifetime, "Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech", in 1921. It was aimed at a more general audience and talked about the precision and beauty of grammar of both written and non-written languages and was so visionary in its views that is still influences modern linguists.

The way a person expresses themselves shapes their culture, even if they don’t realize this is happening.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Sapir published "The Unconscious Patterning of Behavior in Society" in 1927. Combining both of his concepts of phonology and grammar, Sapir formulated that culture should be viewed as part of individually learned patterns, both conscious and unconscious and not as external elements. If culture comes from learned rules of the society instead of as fixed structure, and language plays a key role in thought and communications, then culture and language are distinctly tied together. The way a person expresses themselves shapes their culture, even if they don't realize this is happening.

His 1929 paper "The Status of Linguistics as a Science" furthered these ideas. Because of a language's central place in a culture, it works as a "guide to 'social reality"' and largely shapes an individual's and a culture's perception of the world. Since language can be subjected to a systematic analysis, it can also be an essential tool for understanding a culture, even it's most elusive aspects.


Benjamin Lee Whorf

These theories became his contribution to a larger theory, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. One of Sapir's students, Benjamin Lee Whorf, wrote more along this same theory after Sapir's death, publishing his own observations on how linguistic differences have consequences in human cognition and behavior. Harry Hoijer, another of Sapir's students, actually created the term "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis", even though Sapir and Whorf never put forth any such hypothesis or even worked together to formulate the ideas apart from the teacher-student relationship. Yet this has become what most people know of Sapir.

Sapir contributed to almost every important topic in linguistics and while some of his works no longer receive as much attention, like that on the construction of an international language, his influence on linguistics and related fields can still be strongly felt today. He also produced an extremely large volume of work during his lifetime and his many themes are still discussed by modern students of linguistics.

PARTIAL LIST OF WORKS
  • (1907) "Preliminary Report on the Language and Mythology of the Upper Chinook," American Anthropologist, n.s., 9
  • (1910) "Some Fundamental Characteristics of the Ute Language" [abstract], Science, n.s., 31 (1910):350-352; Also published in American Anthropologist, n.s., 12
  • (1908) "On the Etymology of Sanskrit asru, Avestan asru, Greek dakru," in Spiegel Memorial Volume, J. J. Modi, ed. Bombay
  • (1911) "Some Aspects of Nootka Language and Culture," American Anthropologist, n.s., 13
  • (1911) "The Problem of Noun Incorporation in American Languages," American Anthropologist, n.s., 13
  • (1912) "Language and Environment," American Anthropologist, n.s., 14
  • (1913) "Wiyot and Yurok, Algonkin Languages of California," American Anthropologist, n.s., 15
  • (1915) Noun Reduplication in Comox, a Salish Language of Vancouver Island , Canada Department of Mines, Geological Survey, Memoir 63, Anthropological Series, No. 6.
  • (1915) "Algonkin Languages of California: a Reply," American Anthropologist, n.s., 17
  • (1915) "The Na-dene Languages, a Preliminary Report," American Anthropologist, n.s., 17
  • (1915) "Corrigenda to Father Morice's Chasta Costa and the Dene Languages of the North," American Anthropologist, n.s., 17
  • (1916) "Phonetic Orthography and Notes to 'Nootka,' " in "Vocabularies from the Northwest Coast of America," Franz Boas, ed., Proceedings, American Antiquarian Society, 26
  • (1916) "Phonetic Orthography and Notes to 'Nootka,' " in Phonetic Transcriptions of Indian Languages, Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, 66
  • (1917) "Linguistic Publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, a General Review," International Journal of American Linguistics, 1
  • (1918) "An Ethnological Note on the 'Whiskey-Jack'," The Ottawa Naturalist, 32
  • (1920) "The Hokan and Coahuiltecan Languages," International Journal of American Linguistics, 1
  • (1920) "A Note on the First Person Plural in Chimariko," International Journal of American Linguistics, 1
  • (1920) Review of J. Alden Mason, The Language of the Salinan Indians, in International Journal of American Linguistics, 1
  • (1921) Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (New York, Harcourt, Brace).
  • (1921) "A Bird's-eye View of American Languages North of Mexico," Science, n.s., 54
  • (1922) The Fundamental Elements of Northern Yana , University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, 13
  • (1922) "The Takelma Language of Southwestern Oregon," in Handbook of American Indian Languages, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40, Part II,
  • (1922) "Language and Literature" (chap. 11 of Language, 1921), The Canadian Magazine, 59
  • (1923) "The Phonetics of Haida," International Journal of American Linguistics, 2
  • (1924) "The Grammarian and His Language," American Mercury, 1
  • (1925) "Memorandum on the Problem of an International Auxiliary Language," The Romanic Review, 16
  • (1925) "Pitch Accent in Sarcee, an Athabaskan Language," Journal, Société des Américanistes de Paris, n.s., 17
  • (1925) "Sound Patterns in Language," Language, 1
  • (1926) "Philology," in The Encyclopaedia Britannica (Supplementary Volumes, 13th ed.), 3
  • (1926) "A Chinookan Phonetic Law," International Journal of American Linguistics, 4
  • (1926) "Language as a Form of Human Behavior," The English Journal, 16
  • (1927) "An Expedition to Ancient America: A Professor and a Chinese Student Rescue the Vanishing Language and Culture of the Hupas in Northern California," The University of Chicago Magazine, 20
  • (1929) "Central and North American Languages," Encyclopaedia Britannica (14th ed.), 5
  • (1928) "The Status of Linguistics as a Science," Language, 5
  • (1929) "Male and Female Forms of Speech in Yana," in St. W. J. Teeuwen, ed., Donum Natalicium Schrijnen (Nijmegan-Utrecht),
  • (1929) "Nootka Baby Words," International Journal of American Linguistics, 5
  • (1929) "A Study in Phonetic Symbolism," Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12
  • (1930) Totality , Linguistic Society of America, Language Monographs, No. 6
  • (1930-31) The Southern Paiute Language: Southern Paiute, a Shoshonean Language; Texts of the Kaibab Paiutes and Uintah Utes" Southern Paiute Dictionary, Proceedings, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 65
  • (1931) "Language, Race, and Culture," Chap. 10 in V. F. Calverton, ed., The Making of Man. New York,
  • (1931) "The Concept of Phonetic Law as Tested in Primitive Languages by Leonard Bloomfield," in Stuart A. Rice, ed., Methods in Social Science: A Case Book. Chicago,
  • (1931) "Notes on the Gweabo Language of Liberia," Language, 7
  • (1931) "The Case for a Constructed International Language" Propositions, Deuxième Congrès International de Linguistes
  • (1931) "The Function of an International Auxiliary Language," Psyche, 11 (1931): 4-15; also published in International Communication: A Symposium on the Language Problem, by H. N. Shenton, E. Sapir, 0. Jesperson
  • (1931) "Wanted, a World Language," The American Mercury, 22
  • (1933) "Language," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York), 9
  • (1936) "Internal Linguistic Evidence Suggestive of the Northern Origin of the Navaho," American Anthropologist, n.s., 38
  • (1938) "Glottalized Continuants in Navaho, Nootka, and Kwakiutl (with a Note on Indo-European)," Language, 14
  • (1944) "Grading, a Study in Semantics," Philosophy of Science, 11
  • (1947) "The Relation of American Indian Linguistics to General Linguistics," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology,
Edward Sapir - Patterns of Language
Writer: Sofia Ozols
Images:
Petey: Edward Sapir, Franz Boas, Benjamin Whorf, Southern Paiutes Indian, Phonology, Columbia University, Navajo mountain
Sources:
• "Edward Sapir" Wikispaces <http://life-long-learners.wikispaces.com/sapir>
• "Edward Sapir" The National Academies Press. Regna Darnell and Judith T. Irvine <http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/esapir.html>
• "Edward Sapir" the full wiki <http://www.thefullwiki.org/Edward_Sapir>
• "Biographical sketch of Edward Sapir" Suzanne Kemmer Ling 403: Foundations of Linguistics <http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Found/sapirbio.html>
• "Encyclopedia of World Biography on Edward Sapir" Book Rags <http://www.bookrags.com/biography/edward-sapir/>
• "Edward Sapir" English!nfo <http://english.turkcebilgi.com/Edward+Sapir>

All images are Copyright - CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Share Alike) by their respective owners, except for Petey, which is Public Domain (PD) or unless otherwise noted.

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