Edward Sapir, (1884-1939), American
linguist and anthropologist. Sapir was born in Lauenburg, Pomerania, and
brought to the United States at age five. He studied linguistics and anthropology
at Columbia University with the noted anthropologist and ethnologist Franz
Boas and received his Ph.D. degree in 1909.
As a research associate at the University of California from 1907 to 1908,
Sapir recorded and applied the rigorous analytic methods of Indo-European
and Semitic studies to several western Native American languages, including
Yana, Takelma, and Wishram. After a brief term at the University of Pennsylvania,
he became chief of anthropology for the Geological Survey of Canada from
1910 to 1925, where his research centered upon the Nootka and Athapaskan
native languages of western North America. Later investigations conducted
by Sapir included language studies of Navaho, Hupa, and Ute, as well as
a series of broad comparative studies. During his career Sapir served terms
as president of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Anthropological
Association.
Sapir's observations of the cultural characteristics of each group
were supported by his studies of their languages. His Time Perspective
in Aboriginal American Culture (1916) used linguistic data in an original
way for purposes of historical reconstruction. Sapir demonstrated his
profound grasp of comparative data in his paper “Central and North American
Languages” (1929), in which he used linguistic relationships to consolidate
the majority of the commonly recognized 75 language stocks into six major
superfamilies.
Sapir's interests extended to European languages and Indo-European
phonology (the linguistic study of sound) as well as to speculations on
international languages. In Language (1921) Sapir showed that each language
is characterized by fundamental patterns. The variant sounds, words, and
grammatical relationships of a language conform to these fundamental patterns,
and this patterning in a parent tongue affects parallel development in
daughter languages; this idea is known as the drift concept.
While on the faculties of the University of Chicago from 1925 to 1931
and Yale University from 1931 to 1939, Sapir shifted his interest from
structural analysis of language to its psychological aspects. As chairman
of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology for the National Research
Council from 1934 to 1935, he fostered important language-psychological
investigations. In Sapir’s view, language, culture, and personality are
a fused whole. Language is a “symbolic guide to behavior” because experience
is interpreted largely by language habits and most obviously demonstrated
in the relationships between language and thought. A long series of articles
and a seminar at Yale University titled “The Impact of Culture on Personality”
directed anthropological attention to the individual within that individual’s
cultural milieu and also had a marked effect on psychoanalytic theory.
(Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2002)
|